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Quick Guide to the New ISO Circular Economy Standards

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Quick Guide to ISO Circular Economy Standards
 

The new ISO Circular Economy 59000 series of standards is a game-changer for businesses transitioning from a linear to a circular economy. These standards provide the framework, tools and business procedures necessary to enact and measure the circular economy.

On May 22, 2024, The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released the hotly anticipated set of three new standards for implementing and measuring the Circular Economy (CE). There will be more to come, but these first three are the foundational tools for enacting business circularity.

I don’t think I’m the only one who got very excited to see the contents of this first set of global circular economy standards. I was particularly inspired by the focus on systems thinking and design as key aspects of enacting CE, as these have been two features of sustainability that I have been promoting and teaching through the UnSchool for over a decade.

For those of us working to advance a circular and sustainable future, it’s been a very busy time, with lots of new regulations, especially in the European Union (EU), such as the new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, and a massive increase in engagement and uptake by companies. So I dedicated the last couple of months to diving deep into the standards, synthesizing the key features and processes outlined within them in order to develop new graphics and put together this article as a detailed quick guide of the circular economy ISO standards.

We need companies to start activating these and for sustainability professionals to be well-versed in their features to support the transition. So, alongside this summary article, we have included more detailed content in our new Level 3 Circular Futures online training program, and I will be running a 2-week live online training in November.

About the new ISO Circular Economy Standards

The three new ISO Circular Economy standards are:

 
 

These new standards are a critical part of the maturation of the Circular Economy, as we now have universal frameworks for defining, measuring, reporting and enacting circular economy principles in business. Before these, businesses had to muddle their way through different options for validating CE initiatives. There have been significant contributions to this in the past, such as the Circular Transition Indicators (CTI) from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, Circulytics by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). Still, many have also resorted to developing their own assessments and reporting methods, which came with a lack of rigor and transparency and often resulted in a non-science-based approach to CE.

 
 

What’s critical with any sustainability initiative is that it’s based on solid impact assessment methods and that data is collected throughout the transformation process in order to make measurable and quantifiable improvements. Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are the best-practice method for products and services (mentioned throughout the new CE standards), and companies’ operations and supply chains can be assessed through reputable impact assessment approaches. However, there has generally been a scarcity of clarity on what approaches for enacting CE best fit a business, making it hard to determine if what a company has done is achieving measurable circularity and ensuring that claims made are indeed beneficial for the social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability (this is also one of the key requirements of the standards).

Now, thanks to these new CE ISO standards (and the several additional ones in development), a uniform approach can be replicated. The guidance laid out in them also enables businesses to truly expand their circular ambitions, adopt a systems thinking foundation and ensure that they measure their impacts whilst aiming for high-level CE solutions.

Like anything that has to be universal, there will be some sacrifices and watering down to allow for widespread adoption. But the fact that we now have these in hand means that we can get to work on expanding the circular economy with clarity over which terms, approaches and methods best advance circularity.

 
“The ISO 59000 family of standards is intended to harmonize the understanding of the circular economy and to support its implementation and measurement.”
— ISO

This article provides a detailed summary, but there is a lot more to share. So, I have designed a 2-week live online training program to fully unpack what each entails. I’ve done a lot of the hard work in deciphering and synthesizing these so I can seamlessly share them with interested parties and help advance the knowledge set of sustainability practitioners and business leaders who want to ensure they are at the forefront of the CE standards adoption.

Sign up for the program here >

What Makes the Circular Economy So Critical?

Circular solutions are integral to transforming how we produce goods and services, eliminating waste, stopping excess resource use, regenerating nature and ensuring a sustainable future.

Indeed, the key goals of the circular economy are to eliminate waste, make things last longer, and ensure that all extraction and production processes are regenerative. We can achieve this by designing products and services that prioritize reuse, are intentionally designed to last longer, have multiple lives, and can be easily repaired/recaptured for remanufacturing so as not to pollute nature or negatively impact the systems we need to sustain us all.

In short, the circular economy ensures that we are working within the boundaries of the planet. It is a remedy to the current extractive and exploitative linear economy, which ignores consumption’s negative impacts on the environment. There is a progressive global movement to transition economies from linear to circular, with businesses pioneering new models that adopt this and governments mandating new initiatives and goals that enable CE at scale.

The circular economy is designed to be a positive force on the planet, where all players along a value chain take responsibility for their actions (known as product stewardship or extended producer responsibility). Indeed, through good design and leveraging the many different CE approaches, we can meet human needs in more sustainable ways and shift our relationship with nature so that we value the materials and resources that come from it all whilst removing waste and pollution at scale.

With that in mind, let’s unpack the new ISO circular economy standards and how they’ll be instrumental in organizational sustainability.

A quick note on this guide: I have synthesized the standards to create a reference for those wanting to know more about how they can advance CE in their business. We offer more extensive training on CE via a 3-part program, from introductory to advanced, and strongly advise that anyone who wants to significantly improve their capacity in this space based on a scientific approach consider upskilling through training and purchase a copy of the standards to review the internal details that we can’t share due to copyright.

 

Overview of the Three ISO Circular Economy Standards

 
 

While each standard offers unique standalone guidance, all three essentially work together.

The first one (59004) details six CE principles that form the basis for the other standards; it also creates a universal lexicon by defining key terms and offers a stepped approach to implementing CE. The other two main standards refer back to the concepts and terms defined in 59004.

The second standard (59010) shares how to transition organizations to circular models through guidance on value and network transitions, and the third (59020) details and enables measurable outcomes by providing information on impact assessment methods related to CE.

There are also several connected standards and technical papers that are in development:

 

ISO 59040: Circular Economy: Product Circularity Data Sheet (provides a framework for organizations to measure and assess circularity)

Together, the suite of ISO 59000 standards provides a framework for assessing, implementing and reporting on CE at different scales and enables companies to employ robust, measurable and transparent CE initiatives. Companies in the European Union will also need to comply with the new Ecodesign Regulation and follow the guidance in the ESRS5 when reporting under the CSRD requirements. Thankfully, there is a lot of crossover between these standards and the new ISO standards.

Let’s take a look at each of the three main standards in more detail.

ISO 59004: Circular economy — Vocabulary, principles and guidance for implementation

This overarching standard introduces six fundamental circular economy principles that are the foundations for all other aspects of the standards:

 

Additionally, the old R levels are expanded to include more R’s (plus a couple of C’s!): refuse, rethink, circular sourcing, reduce, repair, reuse, refurbish, remanufacture, repurpose, cascade, recycle, recover energy, and re-mine. These are referred to as “resource management actions” and enable the foundational application of CE.

The list provided in ISO 59004 on resource management forms the foundation for all of the standards. We have summarized the list provided into this graphic with our interpretations of the actions on the left.

 
 

This standard provides several key recommendations on how to enact CE, including:

  • Ensuring that considerations are made at the early stages of the design and development of a solution/product so that the designs create the highest CE outcomes for minimizing resource use and waste production, referred to as losses and releases (Check out our Sustainable Design course)

  • Applying a life cycle approach throughout the design process (We also have a course on life cycle thinking and assessment that you can take here)

  • Embedding systems thinking as a crucial foundation to CE (in fact, it is listed first in the 6 key CE principles!) I’ve written loads on this topic; Start with 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking and take our Systems Thinking course here

  • Collaborating to improve transparency and identify opportunities to add, retain and recover value, as well as to track and manage resources with stakeholders in the value chain

  • Understanding and measuring the “stocks and flows” relevant to any activities performed by the organization. Stocks and flows are the inputs and outputs and the way they move through the system. This terminology is from systems dynamics (take my 30 Days of Systems Thinking course to learn more about this).

  • Optimizing production processes to enable product and resource circulation and to adopt the principle of resource stewardship

There are also specific recommendations for engaging with behavior change and for enacting design for circularity, as well as circular sourcing, circular procurement and process optimization.

Another major part of ISO 59004 is that key circular economy terms are defined.

 
 
 

The terms “value creation model” and “value creation networks” refer to how an organization makes money and adds value to society and the supply chain within which the company exists. Both of these must be transformed if a business is to move from linear to circular, and they are used throughout all the standards.

What the definitions help to demonstrate is just how we are shifting our thinking about key aspects of the circular transformation and the role that business plays in this. Whilst these are all terms used widely in the sustainability movement, the provision of definitions in relation to how they apply to CE helps to provide us all with a foundation to build from.

The body of ISO 59004 dedicates several sections to defining an implementation model, which we have summarized in this process flow diagram below. The implementation model is an overarching approach, and in the next standard (59010), there is a specific process of business CE strategy development.

The appendix of 59004 offers a long list of actions businesses can take to implement CE at scale (we provide a much more detailed exploration of these in our Circular Economy Level 3 course).

These actions are referred back to in the other standards; they form a foundational part of the business strategy and value model that a company develops and assesses as part of its circular transformation.

In summary, ISO 59004 is designed as a functional and foundational starting point, defining the universal CE principles, sharing definitions of key terms in relation to enacting CE and providing guidance for implementing CE. The other two standards refer back to this standard to provide all of the important background information.

“Adherence to ISO 59004 enables organizations to create and share more value within society while ensuring the quality and resilience of ecosystems, ultimately supporting a sustainable future.”
— ISO

ISO 59010: Circular economy — Guidance on the transition of business models and value networks

This standard is designed to provide clarity on how an organization transitions its business model and operations to the circular economy. It details a business-oriented methodology laid out as guidelines for transforming an organization of any size from linear to circular as an actual actionable business strategy.

The document is laid out across the following key stages of circularization:

  • Setting goals and boundary

  • Determining a Circular Economy Strategy

  • Transitioning the value creation model

  • Transitioning the value networks

  • Reviewing and monitoring for continuous improvement

The Circular Business Strategy Framework

ISO 59010 details several stages in a Circular Business Strategy (CBS). This process is summarized in the graphic we produced below, and the recommendation in the standard is that it can be applied to any size business or organization from any industry or region.

As the graphic demonstrates, the first stage for a business is to set clear CE goals before moving on to the next stage, determining a strategy that identifies the opportunities and risks. Then comes the transformation of the value creation model (this is the business model and involves considering all the “R” levels that apply to your business — but the R levels mentioned above are actually called resource management actions) and transformation of the value network (which is your supply chain and the role you play within it) before the final stage, reviewing and monitoring, in which you would connect to the measurement guidelines provided in ISO 59020.

Detailing the CE Transition Process

When defining your CE goals, you need to be specific about what you want to achieve in the transition from linear to circular. For example, this can relate to reducing waste/resource flows, improving regenerative practices or extending product life. This will set you up for effective measurement and ensure you have clear goals that influence the rest of your transition process.

Once the goal(s) are set, the company needs to understand the current value creation model and the value network that it exists within. The best way to do this is to map the system that it exists within and continues to operate within (recommendations for doing this are provided in the standard’s appendix, and we offer courses on how to do this as well. See our Intro to Systems Mapping course at the UnSchool and Circular Futures training).

The standard defines these 9 business model elements that the company needs to reflect and define CE in relation to. We have developed a detailed checklist and worksheet for companies to run through in line with the questions and prompts provided in the standard (available to our Workshop participants).

Next up is setting the boundaries for what you will be addressing when it comes to circularity and then understanding your current performance in reaction to CE.

One important thing to understand about the ISO standards (and something I’m personally VERY happy about) is that it’s based on systems thinking, so many of the approaches and terms from systems dynamics are used to provide the guidelines for moving through a CE business strategy.

In this goal-setting stage, you are not just thinking about what you want to achieve but also establishing what is going on within your business system and the network that your system exists within. The maps you produce should identify how resources come in and out of your system, informing the goals you wish to set. This also sets you up for the measurement and assessment processes outlined in ISO 59020.

Some key terms to understand when doing this:

  • Business System: The scope in which your business operates and how you define your business as a system.

  • System Boundary: The framework in which you define a system. This can be a physical boundary, such as a factory site, or an intangible one, such as a cultural practice.

  • Resource Inflows: These are the resources that flow into your system. They are usually materials and should be identified by their type and whether they are renewable, regenerative, or renewable. For the purpose of measurement in the standards, water and energy are addressed in separate categories, but all other resources that enter your business system are accounted for here.

  • Resource Outflows: An outflow is what exists in your business system. This will include products produced, waste, byproducts and secondary materials. Everything except water and energy are accounted for in this category.

Activating the Transition: Design for Circularity

Design for Circularity (DfC) is detailed as a significant part of the CE business strategy. It involves a product and service creation approach that ensures all design aspects facilitate the wider CE value creation model.

The standard provides extensive guidance on this, including advancing designs that integrate repair, are easily maintained, allow for refurbishment, and can be remanufactured, upgraded, or reused. These designs minimize resource use and prolong product lifetime.

One of the key goals with DfC is to optimize the number of loops or cycles the product/material goes through to actively avoid waste and reduce material use. DfC is based on a systems perspective. This means that the product is not created in isolation but instead designed within the broader systems context, and the specifics of how it exists in the world, specific locations/cultures, etc., are all taken into account when it is created. I’ve also written a couple of handbooks that cover how to do this. Check out Circular Systems Design and Swivel to Sustainability for practical tips.

The standard specifies the following in relation to DfC’s systems perspective: preventing the use or release of substances that can harm human health and ecosystem resilience; considering the full sustainability aspects throughout the life of the product; and exploring new relationships with customers, suppliers and partners to design a suitable value creation model. This approach takes a full life cycle perspective.

Taking Action: Determining a CE strategy

A CE strategy lays out the goals and approaches that your organization will take to enact CE. This should be based on the six circular economy principles identified in 59004 and developed based on the organization’s purpose, vision, mission, identified gaps and opportunities; its need to reposition within the value chain or the value network; its need to expand its sphere of influence; and its desire to achieve a transition towards a more circular value creation model. Again, the concept of a sphere of influence is something we have been teaching at the UnSchool for a decade, and we have many practical tools for exploring and enacting this, like this 10-day Micro Course, Activating your Agency).

Think about your role within the system you are operating within and the opportunity for you to transition your value network towards full circularity. This will involve resource sharing and stewardship, collaboration, traceability and waste minimization.

From the standards perspective, this is about setting up the framework for long-term sustainability by identifying what is needed to achieve your value proposition now and into the future through CE. Your strategy development needs to include long-term resource availability and impact considerations. There are many suggestions made in the standards and we have created checklists to support ease of engagement (available to our workshop participants).

In summary, ISO 59010 is a detailed look at the steps needed for any sized company to transition its entire business model and value chain from linear to circular. It provides specific guidance on how to do this and focuses on the critical role design plays in achieving CE. All businesses should look at this standard and follow the steps when doing a CE transition.

ISO 59020: Circular economy — Measuring and assessing circularity performance

ISO 59020 is structured to provide specific guidance on how to measure and assess circularity at different regional, organizational, product and inter-organizational levels through methods such as:

  • Defining the “system in focus” for assessment

  • Overseeing targets and actions (of reduction, repair, reuse, recycling),

  • Measuring resource flows (including inflows, outflows, and losses)

  • Assessing sustainability impacts (in social, environmental, and economic systems)

The standard underscores the importance of data collection and analysis by always considering key indicators of circularity, such as the utilization of resources like materials, energy and water. The standard provides these indicators along with the formulas for measuring and appropriate reporting techniques.

The Assessment Framework

The framework for assessment outlines that initially, a context for the assessment needs to be set (this is the system being measured, the CE goals of the organization and any complementary methods that will be used) and is referred to as the “system in focus”.

The former two standards are referred to as the foundations for setting the goals and context for the assessment.

Then, three stages are progressed through:

  1. Boundary setting (defining the system in focus, timeframe and level of the system)

  2. Circularity data acquisition and measurement (select indicators and measure against these)

  3. Assessment and reporting

We produced this graphic to show the steps and elements of these three stages.

The guidelines specify a process of assessment that starts with defining the organization’s goals and then setting a scope of assessment (a system in focus) and a timeframe for the assessment (referred to as temporal state). This is all in relation to CE and sustainability goals. At all stages, the user group, target audience and interested parties are considered.

Some key terms and concepts outlined in this standard:

Circularity measurement requires data acquisition and methods of obtaining and reporting against indicators, which is what this standard lays out the formulas and methods for.

A circularity indicator is a quantitative or qualitative measure of a circularity aspect. From the perspective of the standard, these include mandatory and optional indicators. Below is a table of the mandatory and optional CE indicators.

Resource flows are measured based on internal and external processes, such as what happens inside your scope of assessment and what is external to that. For example, if you are producing a complex product, there are likely many external impacts and flows that you are not accountable for but are critical to your product.

Resource inflows are measured to quantify four types of content and have to add up to 100%:

  • Percentage of reused content

  • Percentage of recycled content

  • Percentage of virgin, renewable content

  • Percentage of virgin, non-renewable content

In summary, ISO 59020 is more complex than the others, as it offers a robust explanation of circularity indicators, a measurement process and the assessment criteria for validating and reporting on circularity at different levels, from product to organizational to regional. Anyone working to justify their CE performance needs to understand these methods so they can set up appropriate data acquisition and ensure they have been making decisions in line with preferable CE outcomes.

To purchase the standards from the ISO, go here.

Conclusion

Needless to say, this is a complex and detailed arena, and even with my many years of experience and expertise in CE, I had to invest a considerable amount of time to unpack and synthesize the specifics of each of the standards. Now that I have, I am even more fond of them! They really do offer clarity and the specifics that enable businesses of any shape or size to follow a process of transformation, set up data acquisition systems and report effectively on their CE performance.

I’m excited to get started in helping companies apply these to their business and ensure they have the right thinking tools and systems to deliver high-value CE outcomes. If that sounds like something your organization is up for, reach out and contact me, as I’m looking for some interesting case studies to work on.

If you too want to be ahead of the pack on this, join my 2-week Live Online training this November 8th/12th/15th/19th, 12–2pm EST / 5–7pm UK for the 4 sessions.

 

Get in touch if you are interested in private training programs to advance your skill set or activate CE within your company.

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10 Highlights from 10 Years of The UnSchool

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It’s been 10 years since I had a crazy idea to start an experimental knowledge lab for adults who wanted to help change the world, and what an incredible decade it has been! 

The UnSchool was born of a need to share systems, sustainability and design as tools for making change. It started in New York City in 2014 and was built by hundreds of people who came to engage, learn, share and create as we ran experimental workshops, events and fellowships, first in New York and then around the world. The UnSchool began with no funding, a tiny team and a lot of passion. And today, at 10 years old, we have morphed and grown and adapted and evolved. We even set up a farm and a not-for-profit for a few years!

 
 

The UnSchool always wanted to be a provocative and positively disruptive force driving change to help address some of the world's most complex problems through using a systems approach to creative interventions. I created the Disruptive Design Method (DDM) to support creative people in activating their agency and effecting change within their sphere of influence. Everything we have done has been about advancing science-led sustainability in its full sense of the word, taking social, economic and environmental action to ensure an equitable, regenerative and nature-positive future. 

Over the last ten years, we have done some very cool, creative and collaborative things, here are just some of the highlights: 

  1. We ran 10 fellowship programs in nine countries for over 300 people, with the last one taking place in Kuching. Watch the recap below!

 
 

2. We’ve made 10 free toolkits and have had thousands of people download and use them.

3. We have had 30,000+ people take our online courses.

4. We collaborated with the United Nations to make the Anatomy of Action. 

5. We restored and ran an abandoned farm in rural Portugal into a brain spa and living learning lab and hosted summer camps, educator training, community open days, creative residencies and immersive sustainability workshops for hundreds of people workshops on the farm. 

 
 

6. We have had our unique methods, such as the DDM, picked up and used by academic institutions around the world (positively disrupting the education system!).

7. We have seen our alumni grow their impact and capacity to make change all over the world.

8. We’ve given away more than $500,000 in scholarships. 

9. We have always adopted an approach to sustainability and climate action that is future positive, solutions oriented and practically activating. We believe in the possibility of creating a future that works better for all of us, and we see the missing link being the number of dedicated people who have the knowledge and skills to contribute to the change we need, in whatever capacity and agency they have. Check out our alumni stories to learn more about this impact and watch the recap of our first very Fellowship in NYC to see how it all began!

 
 

10. We have tried and tested many things, failed first, then adapted and adjusted our processes and methods. We have experimented, laughed, cried, hugged and rejoiced. There have been all the highs and lows of an unfunded startup built on passion and grit, but most of all, there has been change. 

So, what’s next for the unschool?

On our five-year birthday, I wrote this article saying I wanted The UnSchool to be obsolete at year 10 because I’d hoped that after a decade, we would have sufficiently inspired enough transformation around education, systems thinking, science-led sustainability and agency development.

I am confident that we have helped make this happen in many ways, but there is still a lot more work to be done, especially when it comes to transforming the design industry and the role that we each play as citizen designers in constructing the future we want to live in. 

So, we are doing a big rejig of all our initiatives, building new tools, making more free stuff and listening to what people need to help them activate their agency to make change in their profession and part of the world. We will, for now, keep creating tools that help people make change. Most recently, we released a free Eco-Anxiety toolkit as we started to hear and see the impact that burnout and climate anxiety are having on change-makers and people bearing the brunt of a changing climate. We are working on a report that details the responses from our design transformation survey and are about to launch a detailed workshop on the new ISO standards for the circular economy (sign up here). 

 
 

But we also want to hear from you — what do you need to help you make change? 

To make it fun (and UnSchool it), we created a quiz that, of course, involves prizes! It's part treasure hunt, part personal experience reflection, part funny questionnaire. Your total score gets you credit for UnSchools online to get whatever courses or handbooks you want — up to $500 USD! 

Please Note: The quiz is open for 10 days, so be sure to complete it by 11:59pm EST on 15 Sep 2024 to get your UnSchools Online credit.

 
 

I can’t tell you if the UnSchool will be around in 2, 5 or 10 more years. But I, for one, am committed to continuing to create things that evolve and adapt to the complex ecosystem we are all a part of — things that support agents within this system to be equipped to effect positive change, overcome inertia and contribute to crafting a world that works better for all of us.

 
“This is how we change the world. We connect the dots, do the work, love the problems at play, find the connections that breed the places to intervene. We collaborate and test, explore and fail productively. We find joy in the challenges, and we challenge ourselves to be contributors, not just extractors. This is how we change the world with the intent to make it work better for all of us.

Design systems change.”
— Leyla Acaroglu
 
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3 Scientific Methods for Assessing Humanity's Impact on the Planet

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At The UnSchool, we have been anti-celebrating Earth Overshoot Day for several years now. It’s been fascinating to watch the significant rise in collective awareness of just how urgent the need to redesign our economy, production processes and consumption practices is if we are to reverse the destruction of ecosystems, climate and communities. 

It was in the 1970s when we really started to understand that human activity has significant impacts on the Earth. Over the last four decades, the scientific community has invested significantly in developing rigorous methods of examining the causal relationship between human activities and ecological impact. 

Three scientific methods help us all understand our own individual impacts, collective consumption effects, and the ecological boundaries that Earth has. 

Today we are sharing three leading scientific methods for assessing impacts that allow us to gain insights at the personal, product and economic level to go from impact to action: 

  1. Ecological Footprints and Earth Overshoot: Ecological Footprints can be used to assess individual lifestyle choice impacts, as well as collective city, country and global impacts on biodiversity. This method is used to determine when Earth Overshoot Day occurs, which is the date each year in which we exceed Earth's capacity to sustain us, based on collective consumption habits. And for many parts of the world, that is today (Aug. 1st)! 

  2. Planetary Boundaries: Developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Planetary Boundaries method looks at the Earth’s limits in relation to 9 key planetary systems and warns of the snowball effects that could occur if we exceed these. The science is used to show global health and has included such methods as the Doughnut Economy. 

  3. Life Cycle Assessment: A method of assessing the whole-of-life environmental impacts of a product or service, Life Cycle Assessments look at the interactions between all aspects of a product’s life in relation to its actions in the economy. This method is now an underlying element of environmental product declarations and is also the method towards using digital product passports to communicate sustainability across value chains. 

In this article, we’ll explore each of these in more detail. If you are interested in diving deeper into these methods in relation to your business decision-making, we offer professional training for these concepts. 

Check out our online courses “Ecological Footprint Methods” and “Life Cycle Assessment and Thinking”, each at the reduced rate of $59 USD.

 
 

Ecological Footprints and Earth Overshoot 

Every year humanity consumes more resources than the Earth can replenish. This is the definition of unsustainability. As we go into ecological deficit year after year, we consume the resources needed to maintain a healthy system that can sustain and carry all living things on this beautiful planet. 

Each year on World Environment Day (June 5th), the Global Footprint Network announces when Earth Overshoot Day falls in the current calendar year. The date moves around depending on many factors, but the method of assessment essentially looks at the global biocapacity of the Earth and the collective consumption rate of humans. Then a date is calculated for when we have used up the available resources for that year. After that date, we are in ecological deficit, eating into the future generation’s resources. 

 
“Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. We maintain this deficit by liquidating stocks of ecological resources and accumulating waste, primarily carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
”
— Earth Overshoot Day Website
 

In the 1970s, it typically fell around New Year’s Eve (Dec. 31st). That was the last time we lived within Earth’s carrying capacity; now, Earth Overshoot Day is often held in July or August, which means we use up all our allocated resources just over halfway through the year.  

This year, Earth Overshoot Day falls on August 1, 2024. The chart below shows how the date has moved up earlier and earlier each year since it was first calculated in 1971.

 
 

The Ecological Footprint Methodology allows for an assessment of the impacts of an individual, product, company, country, and even the entire planet. Developed in the 1990s, it’s a well-respected means of assessing and understanding the ecological impacts of actions, as well as providing the base data for the bi-annual Living Footprint Report.  

The Footprint Method looks at many “impact categories,” which are areas of our daily lives that impact the planet — like the food we eat, how we move around our communities, and the kinds of houses we live in. All our actions have impacts, and where we live also changes the size of our footprint as different countries have different amounts of biologically productive land. If you live in a colder country, for example, you often have to import food from a warmer country to accommodate your population’s needs. 

 
 
 

This is measured against biocapacity, which is the ability of areas to continuously renew resources or be regenerated. Carrying capacity refers to the ability for a country or ecosystem to sustain or support the population that lives there. This can be for humans and non-human species as well. This term comes from biology and refers to the number of organisms that can survive to the resources within an ecosystem. Ecosystems can't sustain themselves for too long when an overpopulation exploits all the available resources. The result is population decline or collapse; a population can only grow until it reaches the carrying capacity of the environment. 

Resource requirements are measured through global hectares (GHA), and a country or city is considered unsustainable if its demand for natural resources is greater than what it can supply itself. Most modern economies are unsustainable.

 
 

The Ecological Footprint method allows us to see how individual actions accumulate to have big impacts on the natural systems that sustain us. When you do your own ecological footprint, you will be asked to look at your lifestyle choices, which will then draw on the following impact areas:

 
 

The concept allows an average to be made: if everyone on the planet lived as you do, how many planets would we need to sustain them? The global average right now is 1.7 planets. 

Since the 1980s, we have rapidly increased the amount of natural resources that are extracted, used, and wasted; year-on-year, this gets worse.  This means we have a deficit, so we have to find innovative ways to meet our human needs while maintaining and respecting the life support systems that we currently have on Earth. 

One simple goal is to align the red line on this graphic with the green, which represents the Earth's carrying capacity. From this methodology, you can see how we started to expand our understanding of humanity's actions impacting the Earth's ecosystems, which leads us to the next important method, planetary boundaries. 

Planetary Boundaries 

The planet is a complex interdependent system with limitations or boundaries. The atmosphere’s edge is one reasonably obvious boundary, but research conducted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre has defined a set of nine planetary boundaries that are critical to the health and well-being of the planet and, once exceeded, threaten Earth's ability to sustain life. 

  The 9 planetary boundaries include:

  1. Stratospheric ozone depletion

  2. Loss of biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and extinctions)

  3. Chemical pollution and the release of novel entities

  4. Climate change

  5. Ocean acidification

  6. Freshwater consumption and the global hydrological cycle

  7. Land-system change

  8. Nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans

  9. Atmospheric aerosol loading

These demonstrate what we need from nature in order to continue developing and thriving. This planetary boundaries concept shows that there are limits to our actions.  

Late in 2023, a team of scientists was able to quantify the 9 processes that regulate the resilience and stability of the Earth as an entire living system for the first time. 

The concept was first developed by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and a team of international scientists in 2009. Rockström says that we have raced past 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries, these being: climate change, biodiversity, deforestation and nitrogen/phosphorus cycle.

“Boundaries are interrelated processes within the complex biophysical Earth system. This means that a global focus on climate change alone is not sufficient for increased sustainability. Instead, understanding the interplay of boundaries, especially climate, and loss of biodiversity, is key in science and practice. ”
— Stockholm Resilience Institute

Watch Rockstrom explain this in detail:

This work also greatly influenced the development of the Doughnut Economics framework developed by economist Kate Raworth. 

Life Cycle Assessment 

Life Cycle Thinking is based on the methodology of product environmental impact assessment known as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA is the scientific process of understanding what impacts occur as a result of the materials/products that move through our economy (it is also sometimes referred to as Life Cycle Analysis, depending on the country you are in). 

LCA is a complex, deeply detailed process of breaking down all of the inputs that go into making something exist and examining the outputs that result. The European Union states that LCAs are the best framework for assessing the environmental impacts of products. 

“LCA is the factual analysis of a product’s entire life cycle in terms of sustainability. Every part of a product’s life cycle – extraction of materials from the environment, the production of the product, the use phase and what happens to the product after it is no longer used – can have an impact on the environment in many ways. With LCA, you can evaluate the environmental impacts of your product or service from the very first to the very last or from cradle to grave. ”
— Pre Sustainability (developers of the LCA software SimaPro)

Data is a crucial component of an LCA, and the outcomes are often as good as the data used for the assessment. As part of the development of an LCA, an inventory is itemized and used to collect data. 

Functional Units, Goal, and Scope of a LCA

Because LCA has a standardized process of assessment, it makes it reliable and transparent. The standards provided by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) are ISO 14040 and 14044; they describe the four main phases of an LCA:

  1. Goal and scope definition

  2. Inventory analysis

  3. Impact assessment

  4. Interpretation

Firstly there is defining the functional unit of what you are assessing. Everything created can be defined by a primary functional unit that often can be quantified as a certain number of units. For coffee cups, it’s carrying a certain amount of hot liquid (the hot part is important as it dictates material quality), for a pen it’s writing x number of pages of text, for transporting humans on roads you could have a car, bus or bike, so to normalize the functional unit across these, you would define it as driving x number of kilometers per day. The LCA always has a clearly defined functional unit that each product being assessed can perform at the same level so that apples are being compared with apples and not apples to bananas. 

A system boundary is then defined. This is a simple explanation of what processes will be included in the study and what will be excluded.  

Then a goal and scope is outlined. This essentially is the framework for what is being studied. The scope sets the boundaries for assessment. So, if you wanted to look at coffee cup options, the scope would define all the processes needed to transform materials into a usable cup and not look at the coffee or the milk or any of the things that go inside it, as it's not part of the goal of the assessment. The goal would outline exactly what is being looked at, the functional unit and why it is being assessed. 

After that, data is collected and assessed and the findings reported. Usually, certain impact categories are selected. and these are then shown as comparisons against the different products assessed. 

This is the image that the ISO standard includes to describe the core stages of an LCA:

 

Scrutinizing LCAs

When reviewing an LCA study, consider who conducted it, where the data came from, and what the goal and scope are (this is always outlined in an LCA). Also, check for the commissioner's vested interests and what functional unit was used for comparison. 

Additional factors, like the age of the study and what variables may not have been taken into account if it’s an older study, are also important to determine the quality of the data. 

The degree of detail that goes into conducting a LCA is pretty intense and rightly should be as thorough as possible. This detail results in more clarity of what’s going on across the entire life of a product, rather than just one area.

Published LCAs allow the wider community to explore the findings, uncover new insights into industrial processes and understand the environmental impacts of everyday products and service delivery.

Connected to LCAs are the use of various forms of the data in other standards, such as ISO 14024 (Type I label), a voluntary, multiple criteria-based, ISO 14021 (Type II label) for any written or spoken environmental claim, ISO 14025 (Type III label) for Product Category Rules (PCRs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). There is also the advancement of digital product passports in the EU, which should include LCA data.

Remember that LCAs should pretty much always be peer-reviewed if the resulting information is to be publicly published. To check out examples and search for LCAs, type SCHOLAR into google (scholar.google.com) and it will come up. Once you are in there, search for things like Paper Cup vs Plastic Cup LCA and you will find quite a bit of data in the abstracts that are publicly available. The UN has a global database of life cycle data you can access here.

Life Cycle Thinking is a streamlined version of thinking about the full life cycle that anyone can do. We explored it in detail in this previous article, and if you want to dive into it in more detail, check out our dedicated “Introduction to Life Cycle Thinking” online course here. 

Anti-Celebrate by Taking Action this Earth Overshoot Day

The Global Footprint Network maintains a fantastic website dedicated solely to Earth Overshoot Day at overshoot.footprint.org. There you’ll find more information about the history of Earth Overshoot Day, resources for calculating your footprint, and the Power of Possibility platform, which “highlights many ways we can improve our resource security in five key areas (healthy planet, cities, energy, food, and population).”

Another way to take action is by checking out the everyday lifestyle choices you can make to reduce your footprint with our UN collaboration, the Anatomy of Action.  Finally, don’t miss the free courses provided by the UN’s Life Cycle Initiative here. 

Looking for online sustainability training?

To learn more about ecological footprinting, check out our online course “Ecological Footprint Methods” on our Swivel Skills online learning platform.

To gain skills in LCA and apply life cycle thinking to product design and development, check out “Life Cycle Assessment and Thinking”, which is also on our Swivel Skills sustainability training platform. 

Each of these courses is just $59 USD and comes with 365 days of access, downloadable worksheets and templates, and a certificate of completion that you can share with your network. 

UnSchool Online has a full course catalog of choices, including our popular Sustainability deep-dive course, also available through our brand new All Access Passes.

 
 
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Part 2: How Does Eco-Anxiety Affect Global Citizens?

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This is Part 2 of a 3-part series. Part 1 is here and is recommended reading before this article. 

Deep, complex emotional reactions to the realities of climate change are an important and natural response to an existential threat, and the way that the resulting eco-anxiety affects people is different. Where someone lives, their socio-economic situation, gender, age, cultural identity and worldview will impact the type and intensity of the feelings held regarding environmental destruction. 

Since the concept first entered the modern lexicon, there has been a significant increase in awareness, with Oxford Languages (2019) recording a 4290% increase in the use of the term eco-anxiety in English-language media sources during 2019 alone. 

In this article, we will explore some of the contextual aspects of climate and eco-anxiety, looking at the diversity of lived experiences and reflecting on our own experiences. The harsh reality of climate change is that many of the most affected communities are not the ones who have contributed to the creation of the issues. There are deep inequalities and systemic issues with all environmental impacts; thus, emotional reactions vary in relation to this. 

Here, an adoption of a climate justice lens and further research into the impact that geographical context has on eco-emotional experiences is needed. This would allow for a more nuanced conversation and exploration of coping and support strategies. 

The research shows that vulnerability to climate anxiety is most prevalent among those who:

 
 

As discussed in Part 1 of this series, there is a difference between feeling anxious about the anticipated effects of the climate crisis and reacting to the current experiences caused by a lived reality of climate change-related losses. 

There is even a new term for this called ”solastalgia”, which is the “distress caused by the transformation, deterioration, and degradation of one’s environment with relevance to the environment-health-place nexus.” Events that can trigger solastalgia include exposure to ecological destruction from prolonged environmental changes such as land clearing, biodiversity loss or forest fires; experiencing extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, or hurricanes; and changes to the built environment such as rapid industrialization or gentrification. This state is directly linked to the experience of your connected environment being transformed in ways that affect your connection to or perception of that space. 

The relationship between loss and grief is well established, so it's no wonder that people feel deep grief and fear when confronted with the destruction of nature, be it by climate-induced disasters or human-made systems. The knowledge of loss, even if not experienced directly, can be triggering, as it presents a trend that one can assume will lead to greater losses. 

Here, we have compiled some different perspectives on the issue of eco-anxiety and loss from a diversity of regions and demographic groups where data is available. It’s worth noting that much of the research to date has been Western-focused. 

Young People and Youth 

It’s often reported that climate and eco-anxiety affect young people most. Many academic studies report this, such as this 2022 study published in The Lancet which states that climate anxiety affects 16 to 25-year-olds and “...occurs mainly in lower-income countries located in areas that are more directly affected by climate change.” Given that youth are most likely to experience the consequences of climate change in their lifetime, yet have little perceived agency to stop the impacts now, this is very understandable.

Furthermore, a commonly cited study by Caroline Hickman and colleagues from the University of Bath in the UK polled 10,000 youths aged 16 to 25 years with 1,000 participants from each of 10 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines (which showed the greatest number of young people experiencing climate anxiety), Portugal, the UK, and the USA. According to the study, “Countries expressing more worry and a greater impact on functioning tended to be poorer, in the Global South, and more directly impacted by climate change; in the Global North, Portugal (which had dramatic increases in wildfires since 2017) showed the highest level of worry.” 

This study also found that 84% of respondents were at least “moderately worried” and 59% were very or “extremely worried” about the impacts of climate change. Over 45% stated their feelings about climate change negatively impacted their daily life and functioning with many facing negative thoughts, including that the future is frightening and people have failed to take care of the planet. Climate anxiety was reported to impact their life choices and decision-making (e.g. hesitancy to have children), causing a negative perspective of the future and their family security and disillusionment with the government.

 
 

Over half of the respondents in this study reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless and guilty; they also said people had ignored or dismissed their feelings of climate anxiety. This demonstrates a trend where expressed eco-anxiety is dismissed or undermined as being an overreaction or something that is irrelevant and only affects young people. 

Interestingly, just under 20% of the respondents explained that they don’t talk to other people about climate change. When we perceive a threat, we exhibit a fight-flight-freeze response as a biological survival mechanism. The freeze response to climate change can manifest in eco-paralysis, resulting in depression, despair or as highlighted in this case, the inability to respond due to shock and overwhelm, causing the avoidance of the issue. But it can also result in a choice to avoid the threat and ignore it as this also can offer a perception of cognitive safety. 

Adults 

While current research indicates that eco-anxiety is most prevalent among young people, it is important not to underestimate the experiences of climate-related worry in adult age groups. 

Research into the relationship between eco-anxiety and age is still developing. One survey by the University of York and Global Future think tank surveyed 2100 people from Great Britain and found that eco-anxiety was widespread with three-quarters (75%) of adults in Great Britain saying they were worried about the impact of climate change, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN).

Another study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reported in 2022 that 64% of Americans are at least “somewhat worried” about climate change with 27% being “very worried” whereby the sample demographic was born between 1928 to 2012. Furthermore, the American Psychiatric Association reported in 2020 that 42% of Baby Boomers and 58% of Gen Xers are “somewhat” or “very concerned” about the impact of climate change on their mental health. Research from Switzerland in 2023 indicated that older people are engaging in pro-environmental behaviours out of concern for future generations. 

This study also highlighted that older people tend to express their concerns through different emotional responses than younger people. The reality is that many people will live through climate trauma, and the outcome of this acute experience can be a very real disturbance with eco-anxiety as a symptom. Adults do tend to process trauma in different ways to children and there is still much work to be done to understand how eco-anxiety and direct trauma experienced in adults affect their life choices, mental health and wellbeing. 

We are conducting a survey to explore this more; please take a few minutes to respond here. 

Gender-Based Impacts 

There is a gendered element to this all as well. Whilst multiple studies like the University of York research mentioned above report that women are more anxious about climate change than men, it’s also identified that many other emotions such as guilt, shame, grief, stress and being overwhelmed can be hidden under anger. This is particularly the case for men, which demonstrates the importance of not just attributing climate anxiety to women or young people, as it so often is.

When considering who climate anxiety affects and how, we have to acknowledge there will be identity politics around the term, which could affect people’s willingness to identify with it at all. 

Non-Western Communities 

Much of the available research on the topic of eco-anxiety and the subset of climate anxiety has been conducted in Western communities. However, there is a call for non-Western research to focus on the array of impacts on people from diverse communities around the world. Studies documenting interventions have been conducted in Nigeria, Hati and Tuvalu, which take into account the effects of climate-related events and explore different interventions based on unique cultural and social conditions to address the negative effects of climate-related anxiety.  

Some see the term and its current definition as being too reductive and vague to detail their complex relationship with the planet and the injustices they face. Additionally, whether people identify with the term depends on the definition provided to them which, as we looked at in Part 1, the definitions do vary. Thus, this will impact who and how someone associates feelings with the term. 

The realities of climate change disproportionately affect people of lower socioeconomic countries and the communities that deal with the brunt of the burden are those that have not benefited from the last 200 years of industrialization the same way Western countries have. So, there is a significant imbalance in the global distribution of impacts and effects of climate change. Furthermore, the concept of anxiety may be perceived differently in non-western cultures based on localized practices which needs to be taken into account. 

Indigenous and First Nations People

A systemic literature review conducted by Vecchio (et al 2022) describes the critical threat exposure that Indigenous people face when it comes to climate change, explaining that “unlike Western models of health, the land and sea are key determinants of general health, psychological, and cultural well-being for Indigenous communities globally.” 

Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable given that their well-being is directly linked to caring for and connection to country and land. The disturbances that climate change brings exacerbate the physical and mental health impacts that First Nations experience. As such, this can’t be measured in the same way that Western health systems determine. “This intrinsic connection and reliance on natural environments is seen as vital for facilitating health, strength, and cultural wellbeing.” 

 

Image: Linking the physical and psychological impacts of climate change available here.

 

Vecchio (et al 2022)’s study on the existing literature showed that many Indigenous communities experienced a correlation between cumulative changes in their environments and decreased mental well-being, which was expressed through worry, fear, sadness, emotional distress and a decreased sense of self-worth. There was variation based on regional locations, the details of which can be explored more here in section 3.3.1. 

This study on Indigenous Inuit in Canada detailed how climate change, connected with historical injustices, “eroded Inuit wellbeing, expressed through distress, anxiety, depression, social tension, suicide ideation and deep feelings of cultural loss.”

Direct experiences can increase the intensity of the negative emotions, just as a lack of direct experience can decrease the perception of threat. Many Indigenous communities have been custodians over the land for extensive generations with knowledge being passed down, so they are more acutely aware of changes and well-positioned to provide solutions. 

There are places like Tuvalu in the South Pacific where the experience and threats are lived every day by all inhabitants and thus pose an immediate existential threat. The losses are hard to define as “anxiety” when the reality is that the community experiences a daily lived fear of being displaced, but little is being done by the global community to prevent them from losing their country and home. 

Anxiety to Action 

Academic institutions and organizations in the climate action space have started to identify protective coping mechanisms. These include terms such as "active hope" and "meaning-focused coping", which emphasize acting in accordance with one's own values, developing positive framings, and creating hope through action.

One key factor that plays into the degree of climate anxiety is “knowing danger is coming but not having any appropriate scripts, skills, or direct agency in place to mitigate it”, and many interventions are popping up to help address this.  

For example, Climate Cafés offer a decentralized drop-in space that allows individuals to gather and meet in a neutral space to discuss and make sense of their positive or negative climate-related emotions. This model of Climate Cafés has been adopted widely, and The Good Grief Network also developed a 12-step approach (similar to Alcoholics Anonymous) where trained peer facilitators offer a 10-week group program for individuals interested in recognizing and exploring their eco-distress while being supported in finding tangible actions that can help them. For more examples, see this article in Nature. 

Engaging in action in the face of climate change offers one way of regaining a sense of power and building personal agency, which could improve mental health. However, this is where the location and context of the individual directly affect the ability to access such support and ensure that it’s appropriate for the level of real threat. 

Another danger is that when people feel anxiety and powerlessness, they can double down on avoidance, which can further exacerbate the anxiety and climate denialism; this underscores the need for open, constructive dialogue on the reality of the changes underway and how to balance the threats with the realities of action. 

In the final article in this series, we will share a detailed list of actions for addressing eco-anxiety as provided in the literature and also release a toolkit for communities, individuals, workplaces and policy changes that can support transforming anxiety into action. In the meantime, here is a list of resources that can support you. 

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We are running a survey capturing individual experiences with eco-anxiety. The data will be used anonymously in our upcoming toolkit for dealing with eco-anxiety. Please take a few minutes to share your experience here. 

Thank you to Charlotte Adams for her research and writing contributions to this article.

 
 
 

Interested in getting the toolkit when it’s available? Add yourself to the list below 👇

 
 

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    ,

    20 Things You Can Do to Help Beat Plastic Pollution

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    In March 2022, the UN Environmental Assembly gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, and 175 nations agreed to develop an international, legally binding agreement by the end of 2024 to end plastic pollution. Spurred on in part by the growing global awareness of the catastrophic impact that plastic waste is having on the environment, especially the oceans, this historic day also highlighted the importance of us rapidly shifting to a circular economy.

    With the UN’s agreement set to come into effect at the end of this year and this year’s Earth Day theme being  Planet vs Plastics, we are sharing 20 actions that anyone, anywhere can take to help tackle plastic pollution. 

    This is a complex topic, one I have written about in the past. I’ve explored how recycling is broken and asked, Will Global Plastic Bans Work? 

    In 2018 we launched a campaign for a post-disposable future, as one of the main drivers of plastic waste has been the rapid transition from reusable to disposable items in everything from food service ware to sanitary items.

    The big changes we need to see will take all of us contributing in different ways, and one person’s actions can help make a difference, especially if those actions help create a movement.

    If you want to see more everyday actions you can take to make a positive impact, check out the UN collaboration we did called the Anatomy of Action. 

     
     

    20 WAYS to beat plastic pollution

     
     

    SWAPS:  Opt for reusable as often as possible and get creative with trading in your local community

    • Swap from single-use to reusable: This can be done across many areas, from how you get water when you’re out and about to what you choose for your office lunch. Swapping out a single-use to reusable can include bringing your own container or vessel, or finding the time and place to use the reusable options provided. 

    • Rethink food storage: Eliminate plastic baggies and wrap by swapping to reusable containers and beeswax wraps to store food at home. 

    • Ditch single-use period products and opt for new reusable ones: The silicone cups are life-changing! Reusable for years and very effective to use, one cup can save thousands of tampons from being used. The many new period underwear products are also helping save women money and reducing a bunch of plastic, so check out what’s on offer for you and switch out the plastic in your monthly cycle. 

    • Have a clothing swap with friends! Not only will you save your old clothes from the landfill, but you'll also get new outfits for free and have some fun social time. Many clothes are filled with plastic, so in general, try to always opt for second-hand or locally designed and made garments. 

    • Find some freecycle or like-minded communities in your area: Depending on your city, these swap-based communities trade goods and services with the caveat that it’s free. 

     
     

    SERVICES: Utilize services that are designed for and support the circular economy

    • Use a clothing or tool library: If you have these in your city, you can borrow, rent or lease anything from drills and exercise equipment to a fancy outfit you only need for one night. 

    • Food waste delivery services: Many cities have companies that save food from waste (usually due to overstock or minor aesthetic issues), and you can often get a lot of great produce and meals at a discounted price. Check out the Too Good to Go App to see if it’s active in your area. 

    • Subscribe to a low-packaging service: This is common now for things like personal care and cleaning products; they often come in tablet form so you are not paying for all that water, and you can use the tablet in a reusable bottle. 

    • Compost! If you don’t have space at your home, your neighborhood or city collection might have a green waste pickup service. Many places have community gardens that will accept it as well. You can buy small-scale worm farms to have mess-free, odor-free vermicompost right in your home, which takes up a very small footprint.

    • If you have a little one, look for a nappy/diaper washing service: These product-service-system models will lease you the clean reusable diapers and take away and bulk wash the dirty ones (this is key to making them more sustainable, as the bulk washing saves water and energy).

     
     

    STAY CREATIVE: Embrace DIY & activated agency by making your own items and speaking up in support of preventing plastic waste.

    • Make your own! This is a great solution for many household cleaning products and food items like non-dairy milks (almond and oat milk are very quick and easy to make — check out out Hero Veg Cookbook for recipes on how to make these!).  You can even make your own deodorant, toothpaste, lip gloss, eyeliner and many other items with a few basic materials, and the internet has tons of instructions on how to do these. 

    • Take your own: A simple but powerful option is to ask a shop to fill your own vessel when getting takeout or to-go food. You may get rejected, but it's worth asking and raising awareness of this need. Lots of really cool reusable food container services are popping up all over the world, and they might already be in your community! Check out the Dabba Drop in London as an example. 

    • Actively refuse single-use items when offered and make a point as to why: This could be when you are in a sit-down cafe and they bring you a drink in a disposable plastic cup; when ordering, check first what the item will come in and make sure to ask for a reusable option.

    • Don't be afraid to ask: Be it at your local cafe or your kids' school, ask for reusable options and explain why. The more people who request this, the more likely it is to become normalized and adopted.

    • Know your local recycling options and optimize for them: Most places still don't accept soft plastics, but every local waste service is different. Do a quick Google search to learn about your local pick-up and recycling options, and when you’re shopping, select items that can easily be recaptured.

     
     

    SHOP SMARTER: Be extra choosy about where and how you spend your consumer power

    • Seek out zero waste shopping solutions: For example, the ZeroWasteStore app enables you to get pantry items without the plastic. 

    • Buy bigger: Another great option for pantries, especially when it comes to soft plastic for household staples like rice, is to look for bulk options that will reduce the amount of plastic you purchase. This often saves you money as well when you buy in bulk, seek out specialty stores that offer bulk purchasing. 

    • Support shops and stores that are offering zero waste and plastic-free shopping: The key is to reuse packaging, not just swap to a different type of material that is disposable. So find stores that are actively reducing their plastic use and support them — it makes a difference! 

    • Find a local farmer to shop from: Many communities have farmer subscription services where a box of farm fresh food can be delivered to your home plastic-free. This will not only save you money and reduce the amount of plastic you get on your fruit and veg, but it also helps support local farmers (who are heroes in my mind).

    • Invest in start-ups and services that are creating post-disposable products and services: The best way to see more services available is to invest in them, and early adopters can often bear the financial load. But if you can’t afford it, and want to see more of it, then seek out and invest (by becoming a customer) in zero waste and sustainable services.


    HUNGRY FOR MORE?

    If you want to explore more things you can do, explore circular business models in our free Circular Business ReDesign Kit, download our free Superpower Activation Kit, or take on a post-disposable design challenge by downloading our free Post-Disposable Kit. 

    The UnSchool also offers a lot of free content, email micro courses, professional programs and accredited online certification tracks to help you be a more activated participant in solving global social and environmental issues.

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    The Rising Peak of Climate and Eco-Anxiety

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    This is Part 1 of a 3 part series on this topic by Leyla Acaroglu

    Have you ever felt overwhelmed or even depressed by the global climate and nature crises?

    I know I have. Despite having a very optimistic future-focused perspective, I can often feel distressed by the constant compounding disasters; floods, fires, famine — the consequences of our nature-destructive tendencies are all over the news and often present in our daily lives.

    Now moreso than ever, these issues are being directly attributed to climate change, which reinforces the need for action. But when you don’t see the action happening, it can create an even deeper sense of anxiety and despair.

    The resulting stress and pessimism felt by the awareness of environmental issues is called climate or eco-anxiety, and we recently took some time to look into the science behind this. What we found was really concerning. This appears to be widespread with the emotional and psychological toll of inaction affecting people’s mental health, life choices and productivity across all age groups.

    I wanted to share some of the high-level things we learned through our research, which also prompted us to create a survey about eco-anxiety to understand more about how this is affecting people in our community so we can develop some creative change-making tools to support people experiencing this. If you have a few moments to spare, please take it ⬇️

     
     

    Over the next couple of months I will share a series of articles on what we have found out, report on what you share with us via the survey, and develop a toolkit for tackling this issue in a creative way.

     

    Get the Toolkit

    Sign up to be the first notified when the Eco-Anxiety Toolkit is ready.

      We respect your privacy. Your information will only be used to send you the information you are signing up for.

       

      What’s going on?

      Climate-related emotions are becoming more prevalent as the awareness of the severity and the urgency to act on climate change has become more mainstream.

      There has been an increase in the number of people expressing their experience of negative emotions, such as climate anxiety and distress about the future, as a result.

      The concept of anxiety brought about as a result of experiencing environmental issues was first mentioned in the general media in the 90s to address citizen concerns about pollution in the Chesapeake Bay in the US. It started gaining more mainstream discussion in 2007, with the work of individual scholars like the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht leading the conversation into the early 2010s.

      However, eco-anxiety did not begin to garner as much widespread attention and research as we see today until 2017 when the American Psychological Association partnered with ecoAmerica and Climate for Health to deliver the report Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance.

       
       

      This report delivered a working definition of eco-anxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” This identified a host of emotional and physiological experiences ranging from anxiety and depression to fear and “doomism” as part of the suite of emotional states felt by people in response to environmental disasters and threats. The report points out “that uncertainty, unpredictability, and uncontrollability seem to be important factors in eco-anxiety. Most forms of eco-anxiety appear to be non-clinical, but cases of ‘pathological’ eco-anxiety are also discussed.”

       
       

      Despite this increase in research and mainstream discourse, climate or eco-anxiety is still widely misunderstood as a concept, with this 2021 systematic literature review concluding:

      “Eco-anxiety is a concept used for understanding the link between climate change and anxiety associated with perceptions about the negative impacts of climate change. The evidence suggests that further clarity and theoretical development of the concept is required to advance conceptual understanding of eco-anxiety. Our review also showed that most of the evidence comes from the Western countries, and more research is needed in other parts of the world. Indigenous peoples, children and young people are identified as vulnerable where their lived experiences of eco-anxiety are unclear and require further research.” — Understanding Eco-anxiety: A Systematic Scoping Review of Current Literature and Identified Knowledge Gaps

      Meanwhile, as academia works to come to a consensus and further develop an understanding of eco-anxiety, those who experience and live with the effects are left to navigate it with limited support while it impacts their daily functioning, life decisions, perspective of the future and productivity at work.

      The Lived Experience

      We live in an information overload age whereby it’s hard to switch off from content that can cause all sorts of distress and anxiety. But when you combine this with the lived experience of changing weather, fires, floods, the increased severity of weather events like cyclones and hurricanes, when you witness firsthand the devastation that environmental disasters, deforestation, and chronic air pollution have, the effects can be visceral and confronting.

      Some of the emotional responses to these experiences are anger, fear, frustration, hopelessness, avoidance, anxiety, depression, lack of energy and guilt or shame. These can lead to sleeplessness, changes to appetite and difficulty concentrating.

       
       

      Have you experienced any of these effects? Some people who struggle with eco-anxiety have reported difficulty with concentrating at work and can’t decide if they want to have a family with the potential for a climate-ravaged future. In an interesting juxtaposition, some share that they avoid absorbing any media that reminds them of the impending climate doom, while others sometimes even seek it out in what’s been called “doom scrolling.”

      I’ve worked in sustainability for over 20 years, and I absolutely choose to switch off to avoid certain portrayals of climate change. I’ve long felt that the negativity framing doesn’t work to engage people, as I myself become riddled with fear, which makes me shut down. It certainly doesn’t inspire creativity or action.

      Understanding eco-anxiety has the potential to shed light on a range of eco-emotions that reflect our interconnectedness with all life and systems on Earth. Eco-emotions can illuminate our relational ties, encourage us to reflect on what we truly value, and remind us of our fundamental dependency on complex ecological systems so we are moved to protect and nurture the Earth.

      So perhaps the fact that so many people are feeling some sort of pain associated with the crises in nature demonstrates the deep interconnection that we humans have with the natural world and innate desire to resolve this. And these feelings can be transformed from a negative ones of loss to proactive action.

      Let’s dive into how the definition of eco-anxiety has come to spread across three distinct contexts and how it’s affecting us.

      The Contexts of Eco-Anxiety

      There are numerous definitions of eco-anxiety that have emerged as the arena has gained more researchers focusing on it. There are inconsistencies in the use of the term and debate in the medical community around its definition. Still, there is a consensus that eco-anxiety is fueled by uncertainty and uncontrollability (similar to other anxiety disorders).

      The two commonly cited definitions include the APA’s 2017 version previously mentioned, “a chronic fear of environmental doom,” and The Climate Psychology Alliance’s version: “heightened emotional, mental or somatic distress in response to dangerous changes in the climate system,” in which somatic refers to the physical embodiment of stress.

      “The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change. We contend that ecological grief is a natural response to ecological losses, particularly for people who retain close living, working and cultural relationships to the natural environment, and one that has the potential to be felt more strongly and by a growing number of people as we move deeper into the Anthropocene.” Cunsolo, A. & Ellis, N.

      Professor Albrecht, who has been at the forefront of this research, suggests that chronic stress on ecosystems is likely to result in “psychoterratic” or Earth-related mental health syndromes, including eco-angst, eco-nostalgia, solastalgia, eco-guilt, eco-paralysis, ecological grief and environmental distress.

      But this is not a one-size-fits-all situation. The context in which the person experiencing the emotions lives, the threats they experience directly or indirectly and their socio-economic situation will all affect the way eco-anxiety is experienced (a systems thinking perspective can greatly assist in better understanding these nuances).

      For example, a person living in a climate-affected area will have a very different threat level than a person living in an area that has not yet experienced any significant climate-related impacts. There is also the issue of climate injustice, where young people are likely to experience the greatest mental burden from climate change that older generations have caused and where countries that have not benefited from the rapid industrial growth of the West suffer the worst of the climate and nature crises.

      How is this experienced?

      The human brain is wired to respond to threats. As humans we have negativity and optimism biases that help us hone in on threats that may negatively impact our ability to survive, and conversely, have the ability to imagine a positive future for ourselves so that we can still function in everyday life (check out our course on Cognitive Science and Biases to learn more about this).

      The research indicates there are loosely three climate-related contexts for “ecological grief”, which is a subset of eco-anxiety:

      1. Grief associated with physical ecological losses: Refers to anxiety from the physical disappearance or degradation of species, ecosystems and landscapes, which can emerge due to gradual changes over time. This is also sometimes referred to as “slow violence,” in which harmful impacts play out over the course of many years or decades.

      2. Grief associated with the loss of environmental knowledge and identity: Refers to the grief experienced by those who have strong relational ties to the natural world and whose personal and collective understandings of identity are created in relation to the land (this is often referenced by Indigenous groups and identified as a core grief in the fight to communicate this to non-Indigenous peoples).

      3. Grief associated with the anticipated future losses: Refers to the future and anticipated losses to culture, livelihoods, and ways of life based on the changes already experienced and those projected to occur.

      These three contexts can be felt both simultaneously and on a spectrum. For instance, someone who has experienced a climate-related disaster can be anxious about the physical losses of their local environment while also being worried about the future anticipated losses.

      The symptoms of eco-anxiety

      Many of the symptoms of eco-anxiety are similar to that of general anxiety disorder. Like all emotions, the symptoms and their intensity can range and are influenced by personality traits, cultural notions of value (i.e. a greater value attributed to ecological loss can result in greater climate anxiety), and personal experiences (e.g. experiences of climate-related disasters).

      Research into other eco-emotions is emerging and reveals the complex and often competing feelings that fluctuate and can occur simultaneously.

      It’s not specifically anxiety that people feel; in fact, the research states that people have a constellation of emotions with common symptoms of eco-anxiety including:

      • Worry

      • Fear

      • Anger or frustration (e.g. due to the inaction of governments, large organizations and industries; self-directed anger; anger as a result of concern for younger generations and feeling unable to to cause systemic change)

      • Grief

      • Shame and guilt (i.e. their environmental impact or lack of effort in the past)

      • Irritability

      • Hopelessness/ powerlessness

      • Existential dread/ fatalistic thinking

      • Obsessive thoughts about climate change

      • Depression and sadness

      • Shock

      • Stupor

      • Overwhelm

      • Stress

      • Physical impacts include: headaches, stomach aches, chest pain, sleeplessness/insomnia, panic attacks, loss of appetite

      Experiencing intense feelings of eco-anxiety or being a survivor of climate-related disasters can lead to a state of eco-paralysis that manifests as apathy or fatalistic thinking, PTSD, suicidal ideation, and maladaptive coping strategies like substance misuse.

      Furthermore, research is beginning to uncover complex forms of climate anxiety and trauma and their intergenerational effects, such as when environmental damage causes the loss of personal or cultural identity, ways of life and knowing. For Indigenous and First Nations People, this is a deeply embodied experience whereby the loss of nature, land and culture is deeply connected to the colonial severing and stealing that led to the nature-disconnect we live in today (where we moved from human-nature relations that were based on reciprocity to one of dominance and exploitation that has fueled the eco-crises we face). So, in this case, the term eco-anxiety could be seen as a privileged position connected to the difference between those who can afford to feel anxiety about the situation versus those who are living the losses in real time.

      It’s important not to dismiss that positive emotions can also result from eco-anxiety, particularly when the feelings are acknowledged and navigated effectively. They can be a source of motivation for active engagement, hope, resilience, empowerment, and connection, particularly when participating in co-designing initiatives for collective action. The negative feelings are often the stated motivation for people getting involved in taking action, from tech solutions, young activists through to CEOs deciding to make the needed changes to their businesses.

      This is often where the hope lies, in being able to feel through the complex emotional states that fear and grief generate for us and transitioning these from paralysis to action. Or at the very least, having a collective dialogue about the felt realities so those experiencing them don’t suffer in silence.

      We are eager to understand more about these experiences so that we can develop an action-oriented toolkit to support people experiencing eco-anxiety — which is why we developed a survey to capture people’s thoughts, experiences and emotions about eco-anxiety.

      Our survey is designed to help you reflect on these experiences as much as help us understand more about how people are navigating eco-anxiety. The science on how to address climate anxiety is out there, so please help us in creating a tool for making change by taking the survey.

       
       

      In the next part of this series, I will dive further into how eco-anxiety is currently impacting citizens across the globe, so stay tuned for more.

      If you need support, please contact your local mental health support service, there is a global list provided here, or seek support from a qualified healthcare professional. Additionally, the Climate Council offers these resources.

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      Activating your Systems Thinking Superpower

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      Did you know that ​thinking about the full system of chocolate chip cookies​ gave Dr. Leyla Acaroglu the inspiration to start The UnSchool? It’s true!

       
       

      We believe 110% that thinking in systems is a critical tool for positive change, and in this journal post, we’re excited to dive further into the superpower that is systems thinking!

      What is Systems Thinking?

      Systems thinking is the ability to see the whole before the parts, and it's fundamental to the ​Disruptive Design Method​.

      The world is full of big messy complex social, political, and environmental problems, which are all part of bigger systems at play. In order to help disrupt the underlying issues, we need to first understood what is going on.

      From ​climate change​ to the rise in racism, homelessness, child exploitation, global politics and ocean plastic waste, these problems are all part of complex interconnected systems.

      Taking ​a systems approach ​enables you to develop a more dynamic and intimate understanding of the elements and agents at play within the problem arena, so you can identify ​opportunities for intervention​.

       

      This is our simple 6-step flow to making change from a systems standpoint

      Tools such as ​systems mapping​ are critical to overcoming the reductive mindset we were all taught in school — a mindset that teaches us to break the world down into individual and manageable parts, rather than see the complex, interconnected whole. (Leyla wrote more ​about the education systems failures here​, if you want to dive in!)

      From Linear to Circular

      Reductive thinking is what has led to the exploitative economy. In order to get to a ​circular economy​, we need systems thinking.

       
       
      “Problems are just unaddressed opportunities waiting for creative minds to tackle them. ”
      — Leyla Acaroglu
       

      By taking a systems approach, we can each undo the linear and rigid mindsets that helped create the problems to begin with.

      Thankfully, humans naturally have a curious and intuitive understanding of ​complex, dynamic, and interconnected systems​. So, it’s really not that hard to rewire our thinking systems from linear to expanded, from 1-dimensional to 3-dimensional thinking.

       

      UnSchool Kuching Fellowship participants engage in a​ systems mapping ​exercise during one of their sessions

      Our​ Systems Thinking online course​ is one of our most popular classes for a reason: systems thinking is a superpower that anyone can access to make change.

      We also have a handy 10 Day Email Micro Course, Systems Thinking 101, that is just $19 USD and is the perfect entry point for anyone beginning their systems journey!

       
       
       

      If you've already taken our Systems Thinking course, or have expertise in this area, then take a look at our advanced​ Systems Interventions course​ to learn to see critical relationships, understand feedback loops, and conduct consequence analyses. You will also establish causal relationships and gain radical insights into ​systems dynamics​.

       
       

      Want more change-making superpowers? Download our free ​Superpower Activation Toolkit​ for others like Problem Loving, Future Focus and more!

      Questions or suggestions? Reach out to us via programs@unschools.co

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      A New Way to UnLearn: Introducing 10 day email micro courses

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      This is hard for us to believe, but… we have been building courses for people to advance their skills in systems, sustainability, and design for a decade this year!

      In working with so many incredible creative change-makers around the world through the past 10 years, we know that people learn in different ways and have different accessibility considerations for investing in upskilling.

      With the undeniable need for as many change-makers activated as possible right now, one of our goals is to always find new approaches to delivering content that supports personal and professional transformation.

      As such, The UnSchool is now offering 10-Day Email Micro Courses that are packed with activities and knowledge, sent directly to your inbox, for just $19 USD!

       
       

      We currently have 3 different Micro Courses to choose from:

      • Agency & Activation 💥 Need a fast track to get shit done, take action and move your change-making initiatives forward? Here it is.

      • Co-Design 🤝 Want a road map to equitable engagement, better collabs & improved design outcomes? You found it!

      • Systems Thinking 101 🌐 Ready to get your feet wet with all things systems to make positive change? Think of this like Systems Thinking 101.

       
       

      If you’re a busy professional with limited time but you’re keen to learn how to make change, this is the perfect format for you! You'll also have access to the course material as long as you need so you can refer back to it as you build your change-making skills. Perks include:

      • Convenient delivery: All course material goes straight to your inbox through a daily email for 10 days

      • Accessible, robust material: Written in a format that's easy to digest and apply, you'll get videos, downloadable worksheets & extra resources along the way

      • Efficient daily practice: Expect to budget just 10-20 minutes daily to read and do the mind-boosting activities

      Questions or suggestions? Reach out to us via programs@unschools.co

      Enjoy!

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      Reflecting on 9 Years of Unlearning through the UnSchool, in 3 Acts

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      Reflecting on 9 Years of Unlearning through the UnSchool, in 3 Acts

      The UnSchool of Disruptive Design turns 9 years old this week! What an immense pleasure it’s been to create and share this experimental knowledge lab with tens of thousands of people from around the world over the last 9 years.

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      Alumni Becky Querido: Curating Systems Change experiences

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      UnSchool Alumni Spotlight on Becky Querido
       

      Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

      I am a collaborative and creative Learning & Leadership Development professional that enables people to discover, experience and explore their potential, and cultivates in them positive lasting change. I utilize my strengths in connecting people, ideas and perspectives, creatively conveying vision and concepts, and finding opportunity in complexity in pursuit of growth and transformation.

      I find powerful dynamic ways for people to interact with content to turn information into insight and knowledge into experience. My passion for cultivating learning in others has evolved in my 20 years of practice in human resources, change management, and project management. This combination of experience has given me a unique gift in curating powerful learning experiences. My work has included designing change and learning programs and systems for higher education, healthcare and utilities organizations.

       
      Becky Querido presenting information
       

      What motivates you to do the work that you do?

      I am motivated by inspiring others to live a more enriching life that minimizes our environmental impact, and by helping people move from survival mode to thriving in their work and personal lives. My mission is to activate agency in others to be a force for regenerative leadership and renovate their workplaces, lifestyles and communities in sustainable ways.

      How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

      I discovered and started following Unschool in 2019 and was inspired by how the message of positive system disruption. I was curious to learn more about design thinking and how to apply systems thinking to make a difference to our global environmental challenges. (UnSchool team note: Becky completed our online Practitioner Certification Track!)

      What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

      Being an independent learner was difficult but I really connected with Leyla’s message and some of the concepts, such as gamification and social change theory. While it took me longer to complete than planned, I enjoyed the challenges which pushed me outside of my comfort zone and into taking action.  

      What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

      The most important thing I can do is to take action. I have all the knowledge I need to act, and just need to put myself out there, have fun, and continue prototyping.

      Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

      I plan to continue to do workshops and bring people together to make micro changes to their daily home and workplace practices to think and act differently about their consumption and disposal choices.

      How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

      The points challenges were key to getting me out of planning and into acting. The reflections and exercises helped me to generate ideas that got me motivated and ready for action. 

      How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

      My neighbours and friends have been influenced and impacted by my projects. They have integrated small changes into their lives to conserve resources. 

      How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

      Website → www.querida.ca

      LinkedIn → Becky Querido

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      Alumni Julie Beretta: Creating Space

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      2021 ALUMNI PROFILES.png
       

      Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

      Hello! I’m Julie, a yoga teacher, sustainability consultant, and writer (@thesustainablemag, @dinnerconfidential and I just completed my first book). With French-American origins, I was raised in Italy, but after spending several years working abroad and volunteering around the world on different projects tied to sustainability, I moved back to Rome in 2020, right before the pandemic hit.  

      Craving deeper talks, I became an active member of Dinner Confidential, where I facilitate monthly conversations around taboo topics through vulnerability and active listening. This feeds my passion for human relations, which also led me to get trained in the 7 steps and enroll in Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry approach. Using these tools, I help people uncover the unconscious dynamics that run their lives and prepare them for difficult conversations with themselves and others.

      All of the pieces of my work come together for me in my personal project, We Bloom (I plan to launch my website at the beginning of November). With this, my purpose is to create spaces for us to reconnect to our essence, communities and environment.

       
      What words, sensations and feelings arise when you think of sustainability? We started our introspective journey with a breathing exercise and then each shared our answers in this space free of judgement. The COVID restrictions only allowed for 6 people to take part and that actually made this moment intimate and memorable - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

      What words, sensations and feelings arise when you think of sustainability? We started our introspective journey with a breathing exercise and then each shared our answers in this space free of judgement. The COVID restrictions only allowed for 6 people to take part and that actually made this moment intimate and memorable - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

       

      What motivates you to do the work that you do?

      From a technological standpoint, we’ve never been as wired as we are now. Yet I often have the feeling that we are more disconnected than ever before; from our true selves, from our bodies, from others, from nature, etc. We got so deeply trapped into dynamics of separation, but everything is interconnected. What got us to forget that? 

      The work that I do results from a personal necessity I had to reconnect. I have the need to be in touch with my feelings, to move my body, to slow down, spend time in nature, share deep talks —  and I know I’m not the only one.  

      So, opening a space for people to talk about how they relate to certain topics, like the one of sustainability, and getting them to share how they really feel about it, was an important first step for me. What motivates me now (and what I wish to do with We Bloom) is to create a bridge between people who are passionate about this topic and others who are less naturally drawn to it.

       
      How are products made? I assigned a product to two teams of two. Each team went through the 5 key stages (extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, packaging and distribution, use, end of life). Isabel and Flavio analyzed the life story of jeans - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

      How are products made? I assigned a product to two teams of two. Each team went through the 5 key stages (extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, packaging and distribution, use, end of life). Isabel and Flavio analyzed the life story of jeans - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

       

      How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

      I found out about the UnSchool through a friend of a friend. I was looking for simple tools to add to my experience, so that I could demystify sustainability for those who manifested an interest in it yet didn’t know where to get started.  After I heard Leyla’s TED talk, I checked out the UnSchool webpage: finally I’d found somebody who made sustainability look cool and exciting!

      What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

      I did a one month Masterclass in Circular Systems Design at the UnSchool. My experience was rather short but intense. I acquired a lot of knowledge (keeping up with the amount of content was in fact quite a challenge!) and many practical tools and activities (i.e. life cycle thinking, systems mapping, theory of change etc.) to gain clarity and come up with realistic solutions to integrate sustainability into our lives.  

      What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

      I knew that everything was interconnected, but I didn’t realize how interconnected everything actually was.  That was my main takeaway from coming to the UnSchool.

      Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

      Thanks to the Unschool Masterclass, I spent a month getting curious about the following questions:

      • How do people relate to sustainability? 

      • Why do those who’d like to take action don’t do so?

      • What stops them? 

      What I found out was that many of us wish to make changes in our lives. Yet often, the sensations, words and emotions associated with sustainability are so uncomfortable that they make us want to look away instead of digging deeper. 

      So I came up with a simple idea to respond to that problem, and opened non-judgemental spaces - both physical and virtual - for people to share their feelings, sensations and beliefs about sustainability. I used elements of my yoga practice, my facilitation skills, and some of Leyla’s tools to give people an opportunity to explore new ways of relating to this topic.

      I ran this workshop - The Sustainable Practice - in the fall of 2020 and plan to have it again very soon, both in person and online. Stay tuned!

       
      We ended this beautiful day with a round of "Take Home Message". Each participant shared what they got from The Sustainable Practice and how they intend to relate to it from now on. - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

      We ended this beautiful day with a round of "Take Home Message". Each participant shared what they got from The Sustainable Practice and how they intend to relate to it from now on. - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

       

      How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

      The UnSchool helped me mine the problem and gave me the tools I needed to offer easy and practical activities for people to understand sustainability differently. 

      How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

      No matter what I do, I try to remind myself and others that WE ARE thanks to nature.   

      I also try to spread what I’m learning in the various languages I speak (English, Italian, French and Spanish) to assist as many people as I can on their journey to sustainability.

      How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

      I’m launching my website at the end of the month, for now you can follow me on:

      Linkedin → Julie Beretta

      Instagram → Julie Beretta

      Any other thoughts you want to share?

      My interest in human behavior is what inspires me to expand our collective knowledge of our interconnectedness with the Earth. Sustainability isn’t a passion for me, it’s a duty.  And even if what I’m putting forward  is rather simple, I believe it’s an important first step all of us can take to start living  with more intention and respect for our environment.

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      UnSchool Birthday Celebrations and Our Latest Video!

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      WE ARE 6 YEARS OLD!

      Hard to believe that the UnSchool has been around for six whole years! In this short time, we are so elated to have initiated programs all over the world, have supported and connected with thousands of creative changemakers from all walks of life and been at the forefront of positively disrupting the status quo to help design a sustainable and regenerative future for all!

      In this week’s journal, we take a look at our programs and accomplishments, reflect on what we have collectively achieved and get excited about what positive mischief we will get up to next.

      The first UnSchool Fellowship, in New York City in 2015!

      The first UnSchool Fellowship, in New York City in 2015!

      The UnSchool started in New York with our very first Fellowship of 16 brave first-timers who came with us on an experiential learning adventure in the energetic city. Since then, there have been 10 incredible Fellowships, dozens of Masterclasses and workshops both in-person and online, around the world and at the CO Project Farm. We developed and grew our online learning lab, as well as created tons of resources and tools, many for free, to support creative changemakers around the world.

      Every few weeks, we feature our incredible alumni in the journal, highlighting the inspiring and adventurous projects they are working on, exploring how the UnSchool has helped them move their initiatives and career forward. We don’t measure our success on activating change based on vanity metrics like social shares or likes, but instead focus on the change that our alumni are making out in the world, taking action and participating in their communities at large. We see conversations changing and communities taking action and feel proud to be a part of this global shift toward sustainability and systems change.

      Being a nomadic school means we have been invited to many beautiful and inspiring places around the world, with Fellowships in New York, Mexico City, Melbourne, São Paulo, Berlin, Christchurch, San Francisco, Mumbai, Cape Town and most recently, Kuching! We have videos of all our Fellowships on the website, and we are so happy to release the newest one here!

       
      Explore the UnSchool's Disruptive Design method and approach to experiential education through a mini doco of our 2019 fellowship in Kuching, Malasia with a ...

      Throughout the years, we have had participants join us from all around the world, with a strong equity access policy of a minimum of 20% access and free content from our own projects and the ones we are commissioned to do.

      unschool around the world

      So far, we have given away over 250k USD in scholarships to people in over 35 countries around the world. We have an open scholarship form where you can apply anytime, so if you want to join us but need some support, let us know! We also have an extensive free resources section you can access here.

      With such a diverse alumni group, we are always looking to expand our language access, and are happy to be able to offer the Change Makers Lab Cards in bilingual Thai and English, the Design Play Cards in Spanish and English, and the Circular Classroom in Swedish, Finnish and English. It’s on our list of things to do to keep adding more translations!

      WHAT’S NEXT AT THE UNSCHOOL

      Like everyone, we have been rapidly adapting and changing to the post-Covid world. We are every day more grateful that we launched our online learning platform several years ago, with around 60 classes, certifications, games, toolkits, handbooks and other resources for people like you, looking to make change and gain the tools to do so.

      We’ve been busy building new offerings that include a very exciting suite of Sustainability in Business programs, both live online (join us in October!) and self-paced (coming soon!!), along with a youth program (ages 12+).

      We also somehow found the time to release a cookbook of all your favourite (and more!) UnSchool plant-based meals.

      Cover_HeroVeg.png

      And… we are releasing an UnSchool App!

      In other exciting new ventures, we are building an app! We have listened and heard from so many of our alumni about the desire to be able to more easily connect with other UnSchoolers (although you do seem to pop up with collaborations quite often!) and we finally have some time to make it happen.

      Watch out in the near future as we beta test an app designed to connect you to each other in a non-social media way, where we can have our own space to share, take on challenges, find each other, and connect in new and exciting ways. We’ve never designed an app before, so it will be a fun and rapidly changing experiment in which we have a great group of beta volunteers to test out and help us refine to be the best experience we can make.

      We are also brainstorming ways to stay connected in the time of reduced travel, so watch out for new launches, workshops, collaborations and other ways of continuing the UnSchool adventure. Stay tuned for more info!

      OUR BIRTHDAY PRESENT TO YOU!

      In celebration of our birthday, we are having a 48-hour flash sale on all things UnSchool!* Use the code BIRTHDAY50 for the next 48 hours to get all things UnSchool half off and celebrate another year of making change with us!

      unschool flash sale

      *Subscription products will have the discount applied to the first instalment



       
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      UnSchool Youth Activation 4 Week Sustainability and Make Change Sprint

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      To celebrate our newest online learning challenge, the Youth Activation 4 Week Sustainability and Make Change Sprint, we are sharing some highlights of the content with you in this week’s UnSchool Journal.

      Designed for 12-18 year-olds wanting to gain the tools for making positive change in the world around them, the content is all about agency activation, systems thinking, sustainability sciences, cognitive science and ideation. The program is jam-packed with daily activities and brain expanding content perfect for any young changemaker.

      Designed as a 4-week sprint, the format has daily content with quizzes at the end of each week to unlock the following week’s content.

       
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      Who is the program for?

      This program is designed for young people interested in activating themselves to become leaders for social and environmental change. 

      We believe young people are critical to designing a positive future, and we also know that much of the mainstream education system doesn't give us tools to dissect the complex systems around us all and then activate our agency in order to effect change. 

      Everyone has the capacity to make a positive impact, and we are committed to helping people all over the world uncover and activate their capacity to help design a future that works better than today. 

      You will get a lot out of this program if you are: 

      • between the ages of 12 and 18 

      • have a deep desire to be a positive force on the world around you 

      • get frustrated by inaction and want to gain the tools to create change 

      • want to understand how the world and the human mind works 

      • love to read, learn and think differently (or want to be challenged to develop these skills!)

      Parents, if you are keen to support your young changemaker, then this program is for you, too. There are lots of great learning experiences that will support you and your young person to develop tools for effecting positive change. We have made this content easy to digest, without taking away from the complexity of the world. If anything, this toolkit will help anyone discover how to love and appreciate the complex world we live in and to design creative ways of helping make it a better place. 

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      Overview of the Program

      Week 1: Activating Your Agency and Making Change 

      Here we explore how you, yes you, can find the power and tools to activate your agency, expand your sphere of influence, develop reflective and critical thinking skills, expand your mindset and be a positive force on the world around you! 

      Week 2: Sustainability and Systems Thinking 

      From unsustainability to the sustainable development goals, the circular economy and the tools for exploring complex systems in the world around us, this week we will dive deep into the issues and the opportunities for exploring and changing them!

      Week 3: Exploring the Human Experience 

      Humans can be very weird, which can make it hard to understand, empathize and effect change. So in this week's content, we cover how the human brain works, cognitive biases, social norms and the odd things that affect how we each engage with and ultimately impact the world around us. 

      Week 4: Activating Change

      Here we explore all the creative ways you can develop projects and initiatives that support positive impacts on the world around you! 

      A Sneak Peek at the Content

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      Week 1: AGENCY

      Let's look at how to activate agency for ourselves and in others by working on identifying and expanding your sphere of influence. The first part of the Design Systems Change Handbook goes into this in great detail, and here is the summary version. 

      Agency is the capacity of an individual to take action in a particular environment. For most of our lives, we are taught that we don't have impacts on the world around us. An agentized individual, however, is aware of their influence and the dynamic relationship they have with the world. 

      Every action we take or don't take has an impact: the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe - it all has an impactful relationship with the world.

      Your agency is about your capacity to act independently and make free choices. These choices are affected by your worldview and the way you see yourself, formed through your experiences with the world, society in general and the things you chose to learn. 

      Social structures and circumstances have a huge impact on one's agency, and the life you are born into can increase or decrease your “given” agency. Many of these social structures and circumstances are out of our control, yet they have a huge impact on our agency. The most critical thing is how you interpret your experiences and what they do to your sense of self. Thankfully, we are also seeing seismic shifts in access to the resources that support individual agency development.

      Design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller said, ”Call me trimtab,” (it’s even engraved on his tombstone) because he, like many other changemakers, identified that the smallest part of the system can make the biggest change. A trimtab is a tiny part inside the rudder at the back of a large ship. When the ship’s steering wheel is moved, the tiny trimtab shifts in direction and (re)directs the whole trajectory of the ship. Often, the smallest part of the system can move the biggest parts.

      This analogy is important to consider when thinking about your personal sphere of influence and the agency that you have to make change in the world around you. Many people fall into the trap of deflecting responsibility to others or blaming the large obvious parts of the system, deferring change to elements that they have little control over. But it’s often the small inconspicuous parts that have the most power and influence over the system dynamics to affect change. Our job is to identify them and unlock their potential. 

      Integrity (especially as we deploy what agency we have and develop) is the backbone of our sense of self. It is about having a moral stand that you can refer to and being “whole” or complete when you come to making decisions. As author C.S. Lewis says, integrity is "doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”  

      Expanding Your Personal Agency 

      Developing agency goes hand in hand with developing a firm adherence to a set of values, honesty to yourself and the world around you. Fundamentally, it’s a code of conduct or moral compass that you use to set up your practice and govern your decisions as you grow your sphere of influence in the world. 

      Individuals who have a strong sense of personal agency believe events are a result of the actions they take, and they praise or blame themselves and their own abilities. Those who see agency external to themselves will praise or blame external factors. For example, someone with a strong sense of personal agency will credit their study habits for passing a test, whereas someone else may attribute their success to the teacher or the exam. Likewise, if they don’t do well, the person with the stronger sense of personal agency will blame themselves rather than the teacher or exam (Carlson, 2007).  

      reference: Carlson, N.R., Buskist, W., Heth, C.D. and Schmaltz, R., 2007. Psychology: the science of behaviour-4th Canadian ed.

       
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      Week 2: WHAT IS SYSTEMS THINKING?

      Have you ever thought about how you think? Albert Einstein famously said, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Truth-bomb, right? It just makes sense that when we look at solving a problem, we should employ a different level of thinking to avoid the issues that created the problem in the first place!

      But what is that level of thinking... and how do you do it? We believe that Systems Thinking is the answer. Systems Thinking is a way of seeing the world as a series of interconnected and interdependent systems rather than lots of independent parts.

      But before we go deeper into what systems thinking is, let’s talk about what it isn’t.

      What systems are NOT

      The main way we are taught to think is linear and often reductionist. We learn to break the world down into manageable chunks and see issues in isolation of their systemic roots. This dominant way of approaching the world is a product of industrialized educational norms – in one way or another, we have learned, through our 15 to 20+ years of mainstream education, and/or through socialization, that the most effective way to solve a problem is to treat the symptoms, not the causes.

      Yet, when we look at the world through a systems lens, we see everything is interconnected. Problems are connected to many other elements within dynamic systems. If we just treat one symptom, the flow on effects lead to burden shifting and often unintended consequences.

      Not only does systems thinking oppose the mainstream reductionist view; it replaces it with expansionism, the view that everything is part of a larger whole and that the connections between all elements are critical.

      Systems are essentially networks made up of nodes or agents that are linked in varied and diverse ways. By using systems thinking, we identify and understand these relationships as part of the exploration of the larger systems at play. Everything is interconnected, every system is made up of many subsystems, and is itself a part of larger systems. Just as we are made up of atoms with molecules and quantum particles, problems are made up of problems within problems!

      Every system is like a Matryoshka doll, made up of smaller and smaller parts within a larger whole. Seeing things in this way helps to create a more flexible view of the world and the way it works, and it illuminates opportunities for addressing some of its existing and evolving problem arenas.

      The three key systems at play

      Although the world is made up of endless large and small interconnected systems, there are three key systems that should be considered: social systems, industrial systems, and ecosystems. These three major systems keep the economy churning along, the world functioning for us humans, and our society operating in order (sort of, anyway!).

      Social systems are the intangible rules and structures, created by humans, that create and maintain societal norms, rituals, and behaviors. Industrial systems refers to all of the manufactured material world, created to facilitate human needs (and all of which requires natural resources to be extracted and transformed into stuff). And the last big system, which is arguably the most important one, is the ecosystem. It provides all the natural services (such as clean air, food, fresh water, minerals, and natural resources) needed for the other two systems to exist.

      Ultimately, approaching life from a systems perspective is about tackling big, messy real-world problems rather than isolating cause and effect down to a single point. In the latter case, “solutions” are often just band-aids (that may cause unintended consequences) as opposed to real and holistic systemic solutions.

      Looking for the links and relationships within the bigger picture helps identify the systemic causes and lends itself to innovative, more holistic ideas and solutions.

       
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      Participants can take the course at their own pace as well as run through it as the 4-week sprint. They get access for six months and can download lots of different activity sheets + The Design Systems Change handbook as well.

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      Week 65: International Youth Day | Tools for Supporting Young Change Makers

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      12th August is the day the UN celebrates International Youth Day this year, and what a year to shine a spotlight on all the incredible action young people around the world are taking. This year’s theme is Youth Engagement for Global Action, and over the last year, we have seen so many amazing activations from young people, like the Fridays for Future school strikes led by the incredibly inspiring Greta Thurnberg, as well as the landmark court case Juliana v. United States, which asserted that the impacts of climate change were violating Americans’ federal rights.

      So in this week’s journal, we celebrate the highlights of the last 12 months of youth action, and in celebration, we developed a youth activation kit that is on sale for half price for the rest of August!

      Friday School Strikes

      #FridaysForFuture started in August 2018, by then 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, when she and other young activists sat every school day for three weeks in front of the Swedish parliament protesting the lack of action on the global climate crisis. The now famous youth leader Greta posted what and why she was doing this on social media, and it soon become a viral phenomenon that has grown into a global youth movement.

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      By mid-2019, young people were striking on Fridays in more than 2,000 towns and cities in over 100 different countries with millions of students joining in. This year, September 25th will be a national day of action whereby hundreds of thousands of young people around the world will strike from school, demanding leaders take action on climate change (with Covid-19 precautions in place).

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      YOUNG PEOPLE SUE the US Government OVER CLIMATE CHANGE

      Since 2015, a group of young Americans fought an inspiring battle against the US government, claiming that their constitutional rights were being neglected if the government did not take action on climate change. Sadly, in January this year, a U.S. federal appeals court threw the case out, causing a major setback to efforts to spur the U.S. government to address the issue.

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      The pioneering law suit was brought against the government by a group of 12-18 year olds, including Aji Piper, Levi Draheim, Journey Zephier, Jayden Foytlin, Miko Vergun, and Nathan Baring among a total of 21 plaintiffs, all whom were passionate about the planet and not willing to sit by and watch their government continue to ignore the science on climate change.

      Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz, who presided over the case, said the following when providing his opinion on the ruling, saying that the young people “have made a compelling case that action is needed… Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power. Rather, the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government.”

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      All is not lost as this action has clearly inspired others. After the devastating fires that ravaged Australia in early 2020, a 23-year-old Australian student brought a class-action case against government over climate change. More and more young people are demanding action from their governments and taking action themselves to secure their future against catastrophic environmental issues.

      Youth-led Action Networks

      There are countless youth-led climate and environmental action networks, educational organisations, not-for-profits and campaigns set up all over the world. Here is a list of just some of the initiatives set up and run by young people:

      Alliance for Climate Education

      One Up Action

      Zero Hour Movement

      Youth Climate Leaders

      UK Student Climate Network

      Sunrise Movement

      Indian Youth Climate Network

      Future Coalition

      Hip Hop Caucas

      Youth for Nature

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      Youth Leaders

      Here are some of the youth leaders and their twitter handles all using their voices to forge a pathway towards a sustainable future for all of us:

      Nadia Nazar, 17 from USA @nadiabaltimore

      Holly Gillibrand, 13 from Scotland @HollyWildChild

      Vic Barrett from the USA @vict_barrett

      Isra Hirsi, 16 from the USA @israhirsi 

      Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 19 from the USA @xiuhtezcatl

      Jerome Foster II, 16 from the USA @jeromefosterii

      Luisa Neubauer, 23 from Germany @Luisamneubauer

      John Paul Jose, 22 from India @johnpauljos

      David Wicker, 14 from Italy @davidwicker_hf

      Lilly Platt, 9 from the Netherlands @lillyspickup

      Leah Namugerwa, 14 from Uganda @NamugerwaLeah

      Saoi O’Connor, 16 from Ireland @saoi4climate

      Timoci Naulusala, 12 from Fiji #timoci

      Shalvi Shakshi, 10, from Fiji

      Nakabuye Hilda from Uganda @NakabuyeHildaF

      India Logan-Riley from Aotearoa / New Zealand @IndiMiro

      Brianna Fruean, 20 from Samoa @Brianna_Fruean

      Ridhima Pandey, 12 from India @ridhimapandey7

      Marinel Ubaldo from The Philippines @YnelUbaldo

      Winnie Asiti from Kenya @Asiti

      Ayakha Melithafa, 17 from South Africa @ayakhamelithafa

      Xiye Bastida, 17 from Mexico @xiyebastida

      Autumn Peltier. 16 from Wiikwemkoong First Nation @StephaniePelti3

      Amariyanna Copeny, 13 from the USA @LittleMissFlint

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      Take Action: our 4-Week Youth Activation Challenge

      We have designed a 4-week learning challenge for any young person who wants to take action. With loads of UnSchool content from systems thinking to agency development and creativity, we have packed this program full of exciting and motivating content perfect to get any young mind activated and engaged.

      To celebrate International Youth Day, the Program is half price for the rest of this month. Just use the code IYD2020 when signing up

      Sign up here >

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      Free Sustainable Design and Circular Economy Toolkits

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      By Leyla Acaroglu

      Over the years, my team and I have created a range of free, open-access toolkits to support change-makers in adopting the skills needed to help transform the global economy into a circular and sustainable one by design. 

      Here I have assembled some of my favorite ones and a list of what we have created for anyone wanting to get started on activating change for free!

      Through my design agency, Disrupt Design, my small team and I take commissions to make tools and self-initiate our own designs to help make change, wherever we can we get our clients and collaborators to allow for 20–100% of the content to be free and open access. We ourselves are committed to having a minimum 20% of our content open-source and free for all. 

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      Many of these toolkits would not have been made possible without the financial support of forward-thinking companies and organizations who see the value in creating beautiful and accessible content. So thanks! And if you are one of them, reach out to see what great things we can create together! 

      The Circular Classroom 

      We collaborated with the Walki Group, Co-Founders and the Finnish Education System to develop engaging and practical in-class resources on the circular economy, sustainability and creativity.

      The Circular Classroom is a free, trilingual (English, Finnish + Swedish) educational resource for students and teachers alike. It is designed to integrate circular thinking into high school classrooms, all packaged up in a fun, beautiful format of video and workbooks.

      The intention behind the project is to support young people in recognizing the exciting opportunity that redesigning products, services and systems have for the future, for exploring how their engagement with the world today impacts the future, and for supporting their decisions around future professions.

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      This commissioned project is designed to activate the circular economy in Scandinavia. The 3-part circular education program for high school students is available for free online in English, Finnish and Swedish. It is designed to be integrated into the Finnish high school curriculum, and is applicable globally.

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      The interactive video series and workbook toolkits includes an Educators’ ‘How To’ manual, as through our discovery workshops, we learned that students were very interested in this information, but the teachers felt they didn’t have the knowledge base to deliver it. This program is designed for co-learning between students and educators and includes 15 interactive educational activities.

      www.circularclassroom.com

      Circular Redesign Workshop Toolkit 

      The Circular Economy Workshop Redesign Toolkit was inspired by years of running workshops with companies and organizations that want to embrace sustainable design, life cycle thinking and the circular economy.

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      We developed this over time when needing our own workshop facilitation tools, and then decided to put it together with instructions and make it open source so others can facilitate their own! 

      Download the full toolkit here >

      The Anatomy of Action 

      A collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program, this project’s ambitious goal was to make sustainable living irresistible. To do this, we identified academically-validated lifestyle actions that will make a measurable change when amplified across communities. 

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      A year-long research study we conducted resulted in 5 key areas of impact and recommendations, which we turned into a momentum-building mixed media campaign called the Anatomy of Action.

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      This open-source project includes three videos, a downloadable toolkit to custom adapt to the local context, 350+ social shareable hand-drawn graphics, a 150-page data validation report, and a custom website. Within 15 days of the launch (still ongoing), there were 19k views, 3,500 toolkit downloads and 100+ countries who engaged, translating the graphics and data into multiple languages.

      anatomyofaction.org

      Post Disposable Activation Kit 

      Your everyday actions can help to seed a movement that will dramatically and quickly reduce the massive environmental and social burdens that disposability has led us to, and help activate a global shift to a future that has positive outcomes for the entire planet. 

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      This requires all of us to embrace #POSTDISPOSABLE change! We have created a set of free tools to help you activate your leadership and make lifestyle shifts for a post disposable future! Become a citizen designer and help activate positive change now. Available in Spanish, Hindi & English. 

      Check out the toolkit here > 

      Superpower Activation Kit 

      When I was named Champion of the Earth by the UN in 2016, we were inspired to create a toolkit of the everyday actions we can all take to activate our agency for a sustainable and just planet. That's how the Superpower Activation Kit was born! 

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      We put together this toolkit of everyday superpowers so every active citizen of the world who wants to participate with more purpose in the construction of the systems around them can do so. The 12 powers are based on a wealth of scientific data in our Disruptive Design Method, and the toolkit provides practical advice on how to activate them.

      Download the toolkit here > 

      Change Makers Lab Card Game 

      As part of our 20% open source content policy, we have designed a fun hands-on toolkit that shares a series of activities designed for the Change Makers Lab created for SEAC Thailand. 

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      In this pack you get a full card game pack in Thai and English as a series of over 21 games to play with them focused on sustainability, systems thinking, active citizenship and making change.

      Download the toolkit here >

      Disruptive Design Workshop Facilitation Kit 

      Expanding upon our skillset in experiential education and transformative change, we created this 65-page digital toolkit for Oxfam Asia. The guide was designed after a two-day Disrupt Design Activating Equity and Digital Activism workshop in Bangkok with Oxfam, along with 40 invited creative and media partners.

      The goal was to create a step by step guide they could use within Oxfam to run workshops that help them design more effective campaigns to move people from knowledge to action. Chapters cover everything from ethical research to stakeholder engagement, systems mapping and creative communication decisions.

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      5 Reasons It’s Time for Nature | World Environment Day 2020 

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      Do you think it’s time for nature? The United Nations does, as “Time for Nature” is the theme for this year’s World Environment Day, which is celebrated each year on the 5th June. Of course it's in our opinion that every day should be a day to celebrate the magical natural beauty of the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe.

      But we also wanted to take this opportunity to explore some of the top reasons why biodiversity is so bloody awesome and important, especially in a time where we are challenged by a global pandemic in which many top researchers and scientists warn that nature is sending us a message, drawing clear links between natural systems destruction and the rise of communicable diseases. 

      Nature provides all the goods and services we need to operate the economy, not to mention life. We’ve only recently lost sight of the power and importance of nature in our human existence, with the last 70ish years creating the rise of hyper-convenience-fueled lifestyles that in turn created demand for the design of disposability that then led to environmental crises like ocean plastic pollution, climate change, destructive bushfires, freak weather events and deforestation - all issues that impact biodiversity. As these issues continue to be amplified as causes for encouraging sustainable lifestyles to be on the rise, the world is reawakening and reconnecting to the unrivaled power and importance that nature uses in creation and destruction alike. 

      Here are five compelling reasons why this theme is so important, right now especially:

      1. Biodiversity is critical to ecosystem success

      Simply put, biodiversity is what makes Earth, Earth. Without diversity, we have weak systems that are susceptible to disease — which then breeds a new onslaught of system impacts. The UN explains that biodiversity encompasses the over 8 million species – from plants and animals to fungi and bacteria – that are all interconnected and share our planet as home.  All ecosystems need diversity to succeed. The oceans, forests, mountain environments and coral reefs are all teaming with genetic diversity of all manner of plants and animals. Ecosystems sustain human life in a myriad of ways, cleaning our air, purifying our water, ensuring the availability of nutritious foods, nature-based medicines and raw materials, and reducing the occurrence of disasters. 

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      To learn more about biodiversity and find out more about what you can do, check here for the UN’s “Practical Guide” to Earth Day 2020.

      “At least 40 per cent of the world’s economy and 80 per cent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources. In addition, the richer the diversity of life, the greater the opportunity for medical discoveries, economic development, and adaptive responses to such new challenges as climate change”. - The Convention about Life on Earth, Convention on Biodiversity

      2. All the beauty in the world comes from nature

      There’s a reason that #naturephotography is hashtagged over 108 million times on Instagram. No manufactured life experiences can take the place of the beauty of what surrounds us every day in stunning sunrises, lush landscapes, and wondrous wildlife. We humans are biologically hardwired to be connected to nature (more on that in #3), and throughout human history we have been inspired and fulfilled through the unique, diverse natural beauty around the world. This inspiration isn’t just a feel-good philosophical inspiration (though, who doesn’t love to just feel the warm fuzzies when you see a baby animal or take in a breathtaking view) — it’s a literal contribution to the evolution of our species through ideas like biomimicry and circular systems design.  It's also no wonder that one of the most watched TV series of the last fifteen years  was David Antenborugh’s Planet Earth series. 

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      This collection of videos from TED Ed perfectly explores the wonderment of nature — not just in our environment but truly in an interconnected look at the nature of stuff, the nature of design, the nature of collection action, and of course, the nature of change. 

      People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure. - David Attenborough

      3. The human brain needs time in nature to restore itself — and thrives when exercising outdoors.

      There is mounting evidence that time in nature has huge benefits to the human brain and our bodies. While most attention has been given to the psychological impacts of nature on human well-being, like increased happiness and creativity boosts, other benefits like reduced hypertension and cardiovascular disease, and even lower risks of chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, and obesity have also been found. 

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      Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned that healthier soil microbes yield healthier humans (although, Marco Polo noted in 1272 in his travel diary that the people of Persia’s foul moods were attributed to the soil and conducted his own qualitative study by importing soil from Persia to his banquet hall!) and that three days in nature basically resets your brain. Additionally, exercising outdoors (just a walk will do) has shown improved cognition and increased neuroplasticity, which interestingly helps slow aging.  

      4. Literally everything we need to sustain our lives comes from nature

      Nature is beyond crucial to our personal health and wellbeing, as it provides all the foods, air and drinkable water we need to exist! Complex systems all interact to allow for plants to photosynthesize, create oxygen and filter water. We all are in an interdependent relationship with nature, and as long as we ignore that basic fact of life, we continue to ignore the need for political and cultural changes that will not just protect nature but also find incredibly regenerative solutions that enable us to live within nature and continue to advance our civilization into the future. Technically the services provided by nature are called ecosystem services, and there are more than one could imagine all working together quickly and tirelessly to help life on Earth flourish. So, next time you take a breath or eat a strawberry or drink water and get hydrated, take a moment to think of nature and all the services that the giant ecosystem of Earth provides for us for free. 

      Nature’s oxygen factory

      Nature’s oxygen factory

      Every second breath of oxygen comes from the ocean

      Every second breath of oxygen comes from the ocean

      5. Nature is in a state of crises too 

      The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently declared that nature is in a state of crises too. Aside from the links between coronavirus, climate change and nature's destruction, nature itself is seeing species being lost at a rate 1,000 times greater than at any other time in recorded human history, and one million species face extinction, making this time what scientists call the sixth great extinction. The only difference is it's not a meteoride this time —  instead, it is us who are responsible for this mass extinction event. Scientists have also found something akin to an insect apocalypse, with bees and other pollinators being killed off in the millions. 

      “Healthy ecosystems can protect against the spread of disease: Where native biodiversity is high, the infection rate for some zoonotic diseases can be lowered,” says United Nations Environment programme (UNEP) biodiversity expert Doreen Robinson.  

      The foods we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the climate that makes our planet habitable all come from nature.

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      Yet, these are exceptional times in which nature is sending us a message:

      To care for ourselves
      we must care for nature. 

      It’s time to wake up.
      To take notice.
      To raise our voices.

      It’s time to build back better
      for People and Planet.

      Find out more here

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      This World Environment Day,
      it’s Time for Nature.

      So yes, it’s absolutely time for nature not just today, but every single day, from now until we figure this shit out and implement transformational systems change. 

      To further celebrate and help you get activated to support the global transition to a sustainable and regenerative economy, we are having a flash 50% off sale on everything over at online.unschools.co for this week until June 12! Use code: timefornature all week (ends midnight 5th June GMT time)

       
       
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      A year of Activating Change

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      It’s Week 52, which means we have officially spent an entire year writing and sharing new insights and ideas about how to make a positive impact on the world around us! What a year it has been — from hosting a Fellowship in Malaysia, to collaborating with the UNEP in creating our Anatomy of Action campaign, through to this moment in time, in which we’re hunkering down and figuring out new ways to support and activate positive change in the midst of a global pandemic. So this week we decided to put together a list of highlights of all the cool, creative changemaking things that we’ve talked about and experienced in the last year to get us all motivated for another 52 weeks of making positive world-changing change!

      Week 1: One Person Can’t Save the World, But Everyone Can Change It

      Global Climate Strike 09-20-2019 (photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash.com)

      Global Climate Strike 09-20-2019 (photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash.com)

      In this inaugural article that launched the UnSchool Journal, our founder Leyla Acaroglu lays the groundwork for how we can start seeing the world’s problems as opportunities to activate our agency and make positive change — because intentionally or not, all of our actions already are changing the world around us: The power to make change lies in our personal ability to see our own agency and opportunity for for creative leadership and to then make intentional choices about how we will activate the influence we organically have on the world around us, while working on enhancing this to a point where we can actively make more positive systems change.  Read on >

      Week 11: Yes, Recycling Is Broken

      Photo: Vivianne Lemay via Unsplash.com

      Photo: Vivianne Lemay via Unsplash.com

      With plastic pollution totally out of control and systems in chaos following China’s decision to stop processing a large portion of the world’s recycling, we unmasked the harsh reality that recycling is a placebo that justifies and perpetuates waste: Recycling is a lovely idea when it works; in fact it's a fundamental part of the circular economy, after, of course, sharing services, remanufacturing and repair. But like any system that displaces the responsibility somewhere out of sight, the externalities come back around to bite us all in the ass eventually. Ocean plastic waste is just one of the massive unintended consequences of relying on a quick fix, which then, in turn, reinforces the problem you are trying to solve. Systems thinking 101: the easy way out often leads back in, and there are often no quick fixes to complex problems. Recycling as a solution has reinforced the problem, and now we are dealing with a ‘frankenproblem’. Read it >

      Week 14: Systems Thinking 101

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      Creative problems solving requires a systems mindset, and that’s why systems thinking is one of the core pillars of the UnSchool’s core pillars. In this article, we dive into the foundations of systems thinking and share practical knowledge to help level up your systems mindset: A concept stuck in theory does little for the greater good. Understanding that everything is interconnected and being able to apply this knowledge as a tool for effecting change are two different things, and what’s most important is the practical experience plus the applied tools to turn theories into action. To move from ideas in the brain to practice in the real world, it helps to be equipped with the distilled and applicable knowledge about which tools can be used and how to apply these in ways that achieve the desired outcome — which in our case is always positive social & environmental change. Read it >

      Week 18: Introducing our UNEP Collaboration: The Anatomy of Action

      UNEP unschool of disruptive design

      We were honored to collaborate with the United Nations Environmental Programme to create a project with the intention of activating sustainable living and lifestyles by exploring what types of actions individuals can take that will actually have an impact, if replicated and normalized, as part of people's everyday lifestyle actions. We launched the Anatomy of Action at UNESCO in Paris. We wanted to not only design something that supports lifestyle changes for sustainable living, but also base it on a deeper understanding of what is working, along with why and how to amplify it so that we get new types of behavior norms that encourage positive shifts within the economy: The action set presented in the Anatomy of Action shows everyday lifestyle swaps that fit easily into daily lifestyle choices. I drew heavily on behavioral and cognitive sciences to gain an insight into how to frame these actions as opportunities rather than losses, as the reality with sustainability is that it is a massive opportunity! Read it >

      Week 28: The UnSchool Kuching Fellowship Recap

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      UnSchool Fellowships are nothing short of amazing, as we take a small group of creative changemakers on a weeklong, immersive adventure into activating positive change via systems thinking, sustainability, and design…as well as feast on exquisite local vegetarian cuisine, dive deep into our personal potential, and make lifelong friends. The Kuching Fellowship was the 10th (!) UnSchool Fellowship; it took place on the island of Borneo (Malaysia) in November, 2019. The Kuching cohort included seventeen fellows from nine different countries, and our Fellowship blog shares a day-by-day look at the adventures. Read it >

      Week 41: Sneak Peek at the NEW Design Systems Change Handbook by Leyla

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      Leyla released her fifth handbook in her series on making change! Titled Design Systems Change, it’s packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future. It’s also a workbook, complete with interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make change. This article includes a sneak peek at the introduction and first section on design: Just as it can accidentally make a mess, design can also be a catalyst for positive and significant change. This is because, at its core, design is about creative problem solving and forming something new that works better than the past version.  Read it >

      Week 47: #StayPositive Brain-Boosting 30-Day Challenge

      unschool of disruptive design

      On April 1st, 2020, smack in the middle of COVID-19’s world takeover, we started our 30-Day Brain-Boosting Challenge to help get people motivated to stay positive, make change and develop their agency to get cool shit done for a positive, regenerative and sustainable future. And good news: you can still sign up! This article shares more details on how this challenge unfolds and helps you level up your changemaking abilities: Read it >

      (BONUS COVID-related content: in Week 45, we took a look at how social distancing is doing some good for the planet!)

      Week 49: Get More Vegetables in Your Life with our NEW Hero Veg Cookbook!

      leyla acaroglu emma segal heroveg cookbook

      Join us in celebrating the hidden heroes of our lives, vegetables (yep!), in this fun journal article that announces the release of Leyla Acaroglu + Emma Segal’s co-authored plant-based cookbook. Hand illustrated by Emma and filled with recipes from their childhood and current cooking adventures, along with things Leyla has learnt on the CO Project Farm and collaborations from the kitchen, this cookbook guides you in the art of intuitive cooking based on a veg-centric philosophy. And hey, there’s even some recipes for you to try in a special preview of the book ;) Read it >

      unschool fellowship

      Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with us in this year in review! We also had loads of amazing inspiring alumni profile spotlights; a 5-year birthday celebration and thoughts on 5 more years; thought-provoking reflections on greenwashing, plastic bans, and other changemaking topics; an exploration of our digital footprint that includes a full audit report; zero waste party hacks and lots, lots more!

      What should we write about this year?

      Leave us a comment and let us know what kind of content you’d like to see next!

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      #StayPositive Brain-Boosting 30-Day Challenge

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      On April 1st we started our 30-Day Brain-Boosting Challenge to help get people motivated to stay positive, make change and develop their agency to get cool shit done for a positive, regenerative and sustainable future.

      You get daily dosses of content and you can still sign up here, but we also thought why not share some highlights from the program with you today to help you activate your agency and #staypositive! In today’s journal, we have included some content from three of the daily sessions, which are delivered in “Watch” “Read” and “Do” segments each day.

      DAY 1: AGENCY

      Let's look at how to activate agency for ourselves and in others by working on identifying and expanding your sphere of influence. The first part of the Design Systems Change Handbook goes into this in great detail, and here is the summary version. 

      Agency is the capacity of an individual to take action in a particular environment. For most of our lives, we are taught that we don't have impacts on the world around us. An agentized individual, however, is aware of their influence and the dynamic relationship they have with the world. 

      Every action we take or don't take has an impact: the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe - it all has an impactful relationship with the world.

      Your agency is about your capacity to act independently and make free choices. These choices are affected by your worldview and the way you see yourself, formed through your experiences with the world, society in general and the things you chose to learn. 

      Social structures and circumstances have a huge impact on one's agency, and the life you are born into can increase or decrease your “given” agency. Many of these social structures and circumstances are out of our control, yet they have a huge impact on our agency. The most critical thing is how you interpret your experiences and what they do to your sense of self. Thankfully, we are also seeing seismic shifts in access to the resources that support individual agency development.

      Design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller said, ”Call me trimtab,” (it’s even engraved on his tombstone) because he, like many other changemakers, identified that the smallest part of the system can make the biggest change. A trimtab is a tiny part inside the rudder at the back of a large ship. When the ship’s steering wheel is moved, the tiny trimtab shifts in direction and (re)directs the whole trajectory of the ship. Often, the smallest part of the system can move the biggest parts.

      This analogy is important to consider when thinking about your personal sphere of influence and the agency that you have to make change in the world around you. Many people fall into the trap of deflecting responsibility to others or blaming the large obvious parts of the system, deferring change to elements that they have little control over. But it’s often the small inconspicuous parts that have the most power and influence over the system dynamics to affect change. Our job is to identify them and unlock their potential. 

      Integrity (especially as we deploy what agency we have and develop) is the backbone of our sense of self. It is about having a moral stand that you can refer to and being “whole” or complete when you come to making decisions. As author C.S. Lewis says, integrity is "doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”  

      Expanding Your Personal Agency 

      Developing agency goes hand in hand with developing a firm adherence to a set of values, honesty to yourself and the world around you. Fundamentally, it’s a code of conduct or moral compass that you use to set up your practice and govern your decisions as you grow your sphere of influence in the world. 

      Individuals who have a strong sense of personal agency believe events are a result of the actions they take, and they praise or blame themselves and their own abilities. Those who see agency external to themselves will praise or blame external factors. For example, someone with a strong sense of personal agency will credit their study habits for passing a test, whereas someone else may attribute their success to the teacher or the exam. Likewise, if they don’t do well, the person with the stronger sense of personal agency will blame themselves rather than the teacher or exam (Carlson, 2007)*.  

      *Carlson, N.R., Buskist, W., Heth, C.D. and Schmaltz, R., 2007. Psychology: the science of behaviour-4th Canadian ed.

       
       

      DAY 2: REFLEXIVITY AND REFLECTION 

      Reflexivity is all about mental flexibility, which entails continuing to learn at the edge of comfort when it comes to understanding things, advancing your ability to think in and around something, and not just seeing things from only one perspective, but honing the ability to think from multiple different vantage points. 

      You will benefit immensely from developing a super strong reflective thinking muscle that supports you in your ability to gain deeper insights into the way the world works, how you interact with it and how this can develop your agency. 

      Self-reflection, divergent and non-linear thinking skills, hypercomplexity and reflexivity all involve asking a significant number of questions and fostering a deep sense of curiosity about the world around you. It is about assuming you don't know something until you know enough to know it. Whereas many people seek to avoid things they don't know, instead we relish in the fact that there are always new things to uncover. 

      This is a lifelong practice, something that you develop over time, with consideration and connection to your inner self. Where reflection is the act of thinking back on something and gaining insights from the vantage point of hindsight, reflexivity is about a more dynamic, intimate and developed self-awareness, fostering the ability to think in and through something, rather than just look back on it after the fact. 

      Reflexivity thus is about the circular relationships between cause and effect, especially when it comes to human belief structures. A reflexive relationship goes both ways, where we see cause and the effect both affecting each other in a dynamic relationship, rather than just seeing one part of the connection. You develop the ability to see what happens when an action is taken, and likewise you can see what would happen if you didn't take an action. 

      Through this, we can see ourselves as part of the systems we are interacting with, instead of seeing ourselves apart from them. While reflection helps us learn from the past, reflexivity gives us tools to extract information from the moment we are in and the ones we will enter into. 

      A high level of social reflexivity, for example, is defined by an individual having the ability to shape their own norms, tastes, politics and desires, and it is very much connected to the ability for one to identify their own agency and exert actions that connect to the advancement of one's influence on the world.

       
       

      Reflection is a very useful daily practice tool that enables us each to see inside and gain insights into ourselves, which in turn enables us to grow personally and professionally. But to reflect on the world is equally as important. Tools like observing and recognizing bias, alongside learning to love problems and shifting mindsets, are all part of the tool set of positive, practical, proactive changemaking (and all of which we will explore over the coming days). 


      DAY 3: SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

      Your sphere of influence is the space in which you have the ability and power to change things. 

      The idea that one person can save the world is not very agentizing, as it either encourages people to deflect responsibility for change to that one magical “other,” or it puts an immense burden onto the shoulders of those who want to be involved in the changes and expects them to influence the entire world. What instead is so much more useful is for us all to understand, no matter who we are, that each and every single one of us change the world every day through our actions. We all exert influence over the worlds we inhabit.

      The things we buy, the food we eat, the jobs we do, the way we move around — these all have profound impacts on the natural environment, the economy, and society. Unfortunately, many of our actions result in flow-on effects throughout the system, which are often invisible to us and result in some form of unsustainability. The perpetuation of this blind participation in changemaking is one of the major issues we face. That's why there are movements to change the way we design, produce and consume everyday things so that their impact via our actions is lower. The movement toward a circular and regenerative economy is well underway, and this challenge pack you are engaging with is designed to help you discover your agency and role in this bigger picture. 

      The decision to be involved in change, be it in your personal or professional life, starts by discovering how to activate your personal agency (which we have been looking at), identifying the sphere of influence you uniquely hold (today's topic) and then adopting the tools that will enable you to expand that influence and activate your creative potential to engage with change (content covered over the next 3.5 weeks!).  

      Your sphere of influence is the space that you hold court over, combined with the knowledge you have, the people and communities you engage with, and the integrity you hold (which often translates to how much others value your knowledge, etc). Your sphere of influence is also the scope of the potential impact that your actions may or may not result in. 

      When we are kids, our sphere of influence is small, often restricted to our families, but it's potent because we often wield quite a bit of influence over them at this stage in our lives. Then, as a young adult, we expand to have a more significant influence on our friends and peer group (as they do on us), and this slowly grows out to colleagues and partners and then our own kids and others as time and experiences and life advancements give us more agency and influence over the space we hold. The influence that we can each have is based on the amount of agency we cultivate and the integrity we build in ourselves over time. I will note here there are many structural forces that can restrict some and enable others. This is an entirely different topic, and we will discuss aspects of it later on — I just didn't want it to go unsaid that the lack of equity when it comes to certain resources does greatly restrict some people. 

       
       

      That being said, there is a reality that every agent in a system impacts it. Every action we each take or don't take will have an impact (good, bad and all the options in between) —  the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe, the things we post online — these all have an impactful relationship on us and on the world, as everything is interconnected. The domino, butterfly or flow-on effect reminds us that our actions have impacts. Both “bad” and “good,” intentional and unintentional, everything we do in this big complex system has an effect on something else, and if you identify your agency and sphere of influence, then you are in a unique position to have an intentionally positive impact with the intent to change the systems around you, as you will be enabled to see yourself within the systems and work within its dynamics. 

      An agentized individual is aware that they have influence and that their dynamic relationships with the world they inhabit are influencing them, too. 

      By working on identifying and expanding your agency and sphere of influence over time, no matter how few resources you have, you can find creative ways to leverage this into new ways of effecting positive change. The world has seen this time and time again — the smallest part of the system can, if positioned right, effect the most significant change. 

      That's why it's so exciting to see that we are all in the middle of a great movement toward change. There are many people the world over redefining their lives so that they, too, can participate in the world with more purpose and contribute back to the planet and their communities. And I assume you are one of them too!

      A sphere of influence does not just tally up the number of people you know or the social network you have, although these are important in some cases of social influence (and important for personal connections). The key thing to influence is the integrity you hold and the trust that others have in your ability to influence within the space you hold. 

      FURTHER READING

      • A quick summary of identifying who's in you your sphere of influence here

      • Read about the concept of Locus of Control here 

      • Read this paper on sphere of influence and ecological problems 


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      Now Published! Design Systems Change Handbook + Excerpt: Speed of Change

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      Today’s the big day! We have been working extra hard to get it ready to release (Covid-19 and all!). The new handbook by Leyla Acaroglu, Design Systems Change is ready to transfer creative provocations, reflective activities and fascinating knowledge on design, systems and change directly from its digital pages to your brain!

      Accidentally released just in time for a unprecedented change in our entire world, Discover how to activate change plus build the knowledge and resilience needed in these constantly-changing times by downloading the e-book here.

       
      unschool of disruptive design handbook
       

      Over the last three weeks, we have been sharing fascinating excerpts from the new handbook that you can read here, here and here. In this week’s journal, we wrap up our series of sneak peeks by sharing another brain-activating excerpt from the final section on Change, all about the cognitive impacts that the speed of change has, taking a hyper-focus on climate change.

      The world has changed rapidly over the last week, and many people around the world are now dealing with this extremely fast state of change. With this week’s excerpt being all about the way that the speed of change affects us, hopefully it will offer some food for thought during these reflective and challenging times.

      Excerpt from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

      SPEED OF CHANGE 

      Things that accumulate slowly over time make it hard to tell what is happening until there is a really obvious tipping point, like when you leave something in your fridge for too long and mold slowly grows —  first you can hardly see the tiny blue spores colonizing last Sunday’s dinner, but then suddenly it’s a full-on mold infestation, and it almost always seems to have appeared out of nowhere. 

      The rate of change affects our ability to see and comprehend it. 

      Slow-moving change is a beautiful thing in nature. Leaves turn golden and fall to the ground, we grow old somewhat slowly, hair graying overtime, skin wrinkling at a much slower rate than a dehydrating zucchini in your fridge. But the incremental changes in our atmosphere, the daily contributions of carbon and other gasses like methane back into the open space between the soil and the sun, for example, this slow seemingly invisible version of change is a significant challenge for us to comprehend, as it makes it very hard for people to accept the impending reality that the planet is warming as a result of our actions. 

      Incremental changes, over time, have significant accumulated impacts, unless there is a mitigating factor that alleviates the increase (a balancing feedback loop). When you are boiling water on the stove with the lid on, it starts off all calm and then suddenly the heat generated turns into steam-filled bubbles which want to escape, and as they get pushed to the surface steam accumulates inside the small space between the water the lid, and suddenly, all that trapped steam energy escapes in the form of a rattling lid and spurting hot water. The cumulative outcome of slow change is hard to see until the pot is actually spitting the water all over the place as you attempt to calm the storm inside it.  

      Most of us are oblivious to the way the planet regulates temperatures through complex interconnected systems, from the ocean currents, carbon cycle to the seasons and wind systems. The relationship between these is where the perfect living conditions for life have come into being, we have lived in a relatively stable climatic period of 10,000 years called the Holocene. 

      Yet subtle shifts in the natural systems that regulate the temperature over time has starting to jeopardize the fragile space between the Earth and the Atmosphere. We feel like we live on a stable planet, one in which days tick by and not much changes, except for the leaves during autumn and the politicians in government every few years. But actually, we live in complete chaos. The systems around us are constantly changing, many of them through the interaction with our human-created interventions, we just don’t have the time-perception to see it in real time. 

      We are living in the equivalent of that pot of water right before the moment of boiling, and the person responsible for watching it has walked away. The climate crisis is a result of millions of micro actions by industry, individuals and governments, a multi pronged attack of sorts as greenhouse gas emissions are not just from the burning of fossil fuels (although this is quite a lot) but also from gasses such as methane and hydrofluorocarbons which are released as a result of many different activities embedded in the economy and all aspects of our daily lives. 

      In some situations, it’s easier to see how actions lead to reactions. For example, we have a fight with a loved one and the emotional fallout is usually immediate. We can see how small things, like regularly spending too much money, or ignoring an illness for too long, or trash building up in the kitchen bin, quickly accumulate into larger problems that require us to take action to alleviate the issues. You need to say sorry, go to the doctor or take the trash out. Unless something is done to change the accumulating situation, then you will find yourself in a sad, sick or smelly mess. Yet many of the accumulated impacts of our actions when it comes to contributing to climate change, for example, are well beyond the scope of our immediate perception. We don’t see any of the released gasses accumulating, this is the danger of hard to see change.

      If you say, chipped away at your savings bit-by-bit, it may not look that bad day by day, but soon you will have nothing left. Every action has an impact by either adding to or taking away from something else. In a closed system like Planet Earth, this means all our incremental changes accumulate and eventually create a tipping point of change. That change can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’; this just depends on what your perspective on things are and what the consequential outcomes will be. For example, when your government has elections, depending on who is elected and what they stand for, some people are elated by the change in government whereas others are in despair. This one change generates polar opposite emotional states. But no matter what political position you take, accumulated gases in the atmosphere are being trapped and generating a locked-in effect that prevents heat from escaping the Earth’s atmosphere, and unless we dramatically reverse the release of these gases, by changing the way our societies and economy is designed, the resulting heat will continue to push back against the system that regulates the weather and thus create flow on effects that none of us want to have to deal with. 

      It can’t be a toss up between the economy and the planet. There is no economic activity without natural resources, and there is no human life (or any other life, for that matter) unless we have complex interconnected systems working to create the base materials that enable life to flourish, like water, oxygen and food. There is an old saying that I am reminded off regularly; it’s a bit hippy but remains true: “There are no jobs on a dead planet.” 

      The economy is still largely run on oil, but not just through the stuff that’s burnt to keep the lights on or the transport sector moving. The design of our houses and cities operate as concrete heat traps, this creates an increased reliance on energy intensive products like Air Conditioners. Around 10% of global energy use is currently dedicated to keeping interior space temperature controlled. In Japan, after the tsunami hit and took out the Fukushima Nuclear reactor, the power supply to Tokyo, the second most populated city in the world, was sketchy. As life started to resume there needed to be drastic energy saving measures, so workplaces implemented dress code changes (even Hawaiian shirt days) to encourage casual dress as a way of decreasing the amount of AC needed to keep workers comfortable and productive. The culture in Japan is to wear full suits, even in smelting summer temperatures, thus requiring higher amounts of AC to be used in offices. The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2050 over 5.6 billion AC’s will be in use, that’s up from the 1.6 billion used in 2018. Currently, Japan, the US and Korea are the most AC obsessed nations in the world, but the predictions are that China and India, with a combined population of 2.8 billion people, will contribute to a global spike in energy needs for powering AC units. Of course, one of the main drivers for the need to increase AC use is climate change. 

      This is a dynamic relationship between what we do and what then happens to us. Hurricanes get their energy from warmer sea temperatures. They grow stronger with all the extra moisture in the air, and then they wreak havoc on the humans who unwittingly helped create the conditions for them to grow by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere via constantly running air conditioning units to stay comfortable in poorly designed houses. It’s a vicious feedback loop whereby the things that we design to cure one problem create the conditions for a bigger problem to occur. 

      House design plays a big part in the need for AC. Insulation, eaves over windows and location-specific construction materials and techniques can dramatically reduce the need for AC, but instead, all over the world, we now have these shoddy pre-designed fabricated, un-insulated, eave-less heat-boxes being built alongside giant glass and metal skyscrapers, all of which attract and store heat. It’s called the “urban heat island effect”, when so much concrete and heat-absorbing surfaces, like black paved roads, suck in and store heat during the day and then pump it back out at night, increasing the temperature by several degrees. In Los Angeles, where the city is designed around cars and thus has a huge amount of land dedicated to black roads, in a creative attempt to address this, roads have been painted white as a way of reducing this effect. 

      Sadly, as more tragic weather related events, triggered by a changing climate, such as hurricanes and Tsunamis, when they hit a city they increase the gross domestic product (GDP) of the nation it affects as all the damaged goods need to be replaced, increasing consumption. New air conditioners purchased, new cars and TVs, clothes, sofas, mattresses and kitchen utensils, people will go out and buy all the everyday things they need to live their lives. Emergency services will truck in bottled water and bulk amounts of food. People will go into debt to get their basic needs met. All of the recovery actions from tragedy will look good on the balance sheets of the nations affected, reinforcing just how broken our systems of economic measurement and incentives are. 

      Added to this all is that the inefficiencies of our current energy production systems is staggeringly bad. The old-school way of getting power to customers has been to burn energy-dense things found under the ground like coal, natural gas or crude oil. They are burned to heat water to make steam to drive turbines, which then creates energy that has to be transported to the end-user along wires. Thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, about two thirds of the energy embedded in the raw materials make it into the grid system in the form of electricity, and then another 5% of that is lost in the transmission down the line. Then there’s waste energy at the home, and the impact of power lines falling and creating fires, of which many towns in rural California now have regular intentional blackouts to decrease the risk of wildfires starting, forcing a move to small-scale, decentralized solar grids. One of my favorite facts about the inefficiencies of current energy generation is that old power stations cant be turned off or slowed down; they have to keep running no matter what the demand is. And since we have peak energy demand points, like when the office day starts, or everyone gets home and turns on their TV’s at the same time, energy companies have to run their systems at a high rate to accommodate this peak demand. Which means overnight when less energy is used, in some cases partnerships are set up with other types of energy providers to make better use of this wasted energy — like a coal power plant selling cheap energy to a hydroelectric plant so that it uses the night energy to pump water back up to the top of the dam so it can be released during the day.  

      Herein lies the issue with incremental and invisible changes: they are often so hard to make visible that denying them is easier than acknowledging their reality and they happen so slowly that we all become habituated to them. Just like any cycle of addiction, noticing and then admitting you have a problem is often the hardest part. 

      Slow changes just end up becoming normal.  

      Like how each year the summers get hotter and drier, or the hurricanes come more frequently or with more intensity. First they are isolated incidents, with enough time in between them to forget about the last one when the new catastrophic event happens. This slow normalization process conditions us to accept the new operating environment, so by the time the events are more frequent, they are now a normal part of life, dulling us from the urgency that is needed to pull back the domino effect of a changing climate. 

      design systems change handbook acaroglu

      It is now even more normal that we hear how each year was is the hottest and driest on record, weirder winters with less rain or much more than normal, earlier springs, freakier storms, more intense and regular wildfires. This is change in action. Sure there are many factors contributing to these changes, but the climate is one thing we have been measuring long enough to know categorically that the system is messed up somehow and that we should get our global act together to stop our shared house from burning down, flooding or being blown away. 

      One of the main issues embedded in these changes is that often, extreme weather events don’t offer a clear and direct correlation between cause and effect. There is a big delay in the system from turning on your AC to a freak wildfire. Change is often not related in time, so the ability to connect the dots become more removed. The reality is that these big events are often a chaotic manifestation of a million different types of human interventions to natural systems that culminate in an array of impacts that have significant consequences for human livability. 

      Thus, proving that the changes in climate are singularly linked to XYZ actions is difficult — like the increasing impact of server use on energy demand as a result of all the new data hungry “internet of things” gadgets in so many peoples homes. Or the collective impact of meat consumption of an industry that moved from pasture-fed to grain-fed, factory-farmed livestock. 

      The consequential impacts from all our actions are resulting in the impacts that slowly add up to the mess we are in. And now, the rate of change is being accelerated, so the system is reinforcing itself. 

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      Design — It’s not what you think it is | Design Systems Change Handbook Preview

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      In case you missed it in last week’s journal article, we are gearing up for the exciting launch of a new handbook by Leyla that will be released on March 16, 2020, called Design Systems Change! This is the fifth in her series of handbooks she’s written about making change, with other series titles being: Make Change: A Handbook for Creative Rebels and Change Agents, Tips & Tricks to Facilitating Change, Disruptive Design: A Method for Activating Positive Social Change by Design, Circular Systems Design: A Toolkit for the Circular Economy, and now the fifth one in the series, Design Systems Change: How to activate your career as a creative changemaker and help design a regenerative, circular future.

      leyla acaroglu handbooks unschool

      This newest handbook, Design Systems Change, includes an in-depth exploration of agency-building tools for activating a life and career of creative changemaking. Packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future, by design, this handbook is also a workbook, complete with over 30 interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make positive change. 

      Leading up to its launch on March 16th, we are sharing excerpts from the handbook from each of the three main sections Design, Systems and Change. This week, we take a peek at the power of design in creating a circular, regenerative future and dive into what design is not. If you want to be one of the first to read the full 190+ pages, then you can preorder it here, and it will be sent to your inbox in a digital format as soon as it's launched! 

      leyla acaroglu design system change unschool

      Expert from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

      Design — It’s not what you think it is

      Design is one of the most powerful and pervasive influencers of our lives. It is everywhere, from the bureaucratic processes that drive us all mad (often ad hoc and reductive design), through to the beautiful user experience of our treasured devices (often addictive and intentionally designed to steal your eyeballs away from other things). 

      There are the pain-in-the-ass-designs, like call centers that are intentionally designed to make you hang up before you can voice your complaint, stores that usher you past expensive items in your search for the basics like bread so you buy more, or my personal pet peeve: the airport security line that requires all humans to momentarily become a cow as they are herded through a maze of control. Cities, buildings, products, services, bus routes, election processes — everything that we humans created has been designed by someone or a group of people. 

      As a powerful social scriptor, design gives narrative; how you move around a city or the rules you obey or disregard, for instance, design influences your mind to create actions and form opinions. Our mind is activated in conscious and covert ways by visual signs and physical forms, wayfinding devices, restrictions, symbols and aesthetics. 

      From the moment we are born, to the day we depart this Earth, our lives are profoundly influenced by the designed world. And, despite the hugely influential far-reaching impact of design as a profession and a socially forming process, for some reason, as a society, we seem to succumb to reducing design down to the basics of aesthetics and function, rather than what it is really doing — influencing and forming the entire world as we know it. 

      Perhaps it’s through this mystique that it helps to perpetuate the systems of unsustainability that design enables in our extraction-based economy? 

      One of the things I think about a lot is the relationship between design and the social structures that also influence us all immensely. After all, we are social animals, and humans attribute their success to collaboration and the social connections we form. 

      Sure, we are riddled with biases and are as equally un-cooperative as we are collaborative, but we also look after our young intensely and form strong social bonds and smile when others smile at us, we work towards effectively getting along. We speak shared languages and operate under social expectations that condition us to behave in socially-beneficial ways and to value things in culturally appropriate ways. Objects and symbols are central to the forming of our cultures and interpreting the physical world we inhabit. 

      Designers in all their types and roles – industrial designers, fashion designers, furniture designers, architects, landscape architects, interior designers, user experience designers, service designers, graphic designers, even engineers – all work to create the services, products and processes that the world engages with. Why? Because people have needs that are met through the creation of things. Designers are thus charged with the task of converting these needs into things that meet them and doing it in unique and novel ways that beat the competition. Designers are value creates. 

      This system has incentivized many to come up with the desires before the products can fill them, but that’s an entirely different story to tell. Individually, we might want to stay connected to friends and colleagues so technology helps us do that, but collectively, we need to have a system of governance that keeps society in some sort of stable place. So, we iteratively design governments and legal systems with penalties for misbehavior.

      Design thus operates on many levels to combine competing aspects, such as function, aesthetics, enjoyment, desirability, entertainment and control. The latter can be seen in many of the design decisions around shared communal artifacts, like street side seats or public buildings; there are often many aspects incorporated to deter certain types of people and engage others. The park bench is perfect for the office worker to sit for 30 minutes and each their lunch, but intentionally designed so that the homeless person can’t sleep on it or the skateboarding kid can’t grind her board against it. 

      Design may be the output of imagination and creativity, but it forms the structures that create our societies as we know them.

      The one unifying factor of design is that the driving force behind it is to create something that meets a defined or intended “need”. We define this as functionality, and everything that exists can be defined by its core function. If a product or service does not fulfill a clear functionality, then it doesn’t function, and it’s often seen as lacking value or being purely aesthetic. 

      A chair with two legs that does not stand up is broken, a car without a drive shaft may look like a car but is unable to achieve the act of driving, a blunt knife or a bucket with a hole, a hat with no rim, a building without a front door — these are all pointless things as they don’t serve the core function that is needed for us to ascribe value and thus use them, desire them and keep them in our lives. Or more importantly, we may not part with money to own them. A government without a way of collecting money from its citizens may find that it is quickly unable to afford to pay for the services it intended to offer in exchange for votes, thus it is unable to function in terms of being elected or seen as governing. 

      All designs can have unintended consequences, such as creating perverse incentives, spillover effects or externalities. These are often not conceived at the point of creation and are thus dealt with after the thing has come into existence and the feedbacks of interacting with the world can be seen.  

      Design is therefore an all-encompassing human capacity that reaches beyond the known professions of industrial, fashion, graphic, user experience and interior design. There are also policy writers, researchers, scientists and administrative professionals who likewise employ design as a tool for enacting change. Absolutely everything that humans have conjured into being is, in some way. a designed artifact and thus, should be seen as a product of our constructed world. But perhaps the most important, unspoken thing about design is the fact that whatever we can make, we can redesign, which further opens up the opportunity for the idea us all being everyday citizen designers of the future. 

      The way we each make choices, move through our cities, select food, and act on our consumption preferences all create a type of design outcome, as every action has impacts. 

      By understanding the power of design, both as a profession and as an outcome of the choices we make in our daily lives, then we can gain the tools to redesign systems and unlock some of design’s potential to be an effective tool for enacting positive change. 

      Many designers are none the wiser to the impact that they have; with short timelines and demanding briefs, it’s difficult to find the time to adequately assess the impact of any one or combined design choices they make. But this has to change. We need to foster within the design community a collective code of conduct, a set of standards and ethical guidelines to ensure that what we create is not just serving a system of exploitation and extraction, but instead creating greater value than is being taken. This is what circular systems design is all about!*

      Thus, if we are to design the world that works better for all of us, then our perception of design, what it does to us overtly and covertly — that reductive idea has to change. Instead of it being a fruitless contributor to the world of luxury, business and entertainment, we can leverage design to be the incredibly powerful social influencer that it is by default, as it can make or break elections, control societies, create change and dictate the future. 

      Contrary to all the design thinking rhetoric out there, ask any designer how they do what they do, and they will each give you a very different set of tools, processes and design practices that they use to get from a set brief to a solid outcome. Design thinking is one approach put forth by one set of designers who do a particular type of design work. There is nothing wrong with design thinking; it’s just that it’s not the defining process of design. There is no standardized design process, as design is an experiential act that requires many different tools. For example, an architect uses very different processes than a fashion designer or a UX designer. 

      Design thinking can be done well and certainly serves a purpose, but it’s not the only type of design approach and should be like everything else: questioned for its integrity and viability to solve the more complex problems we collectively face. 

      We can’t solve complex problems with simple solutions that don’t address the root cause of the issues within the system. We need depth of understanding and to embrace complexity. This is why applying systems thinking to any creative process is critical to coming up with solutions that fit within the complexity, rather than trying to design it away.

      ————

      Next week, we will share an excerpt from the Systems section, so stay tuned!

      CLIENTS & COLLABORATORS FOR ACTIVATING POSITIVE CHANGE

      We have worked with loads of organizations, especially ones with acronyms like TED, IDEO, AIGA, UN, along with a bunch that have normal names, too.  We work with small to massive organizations, academic institutes and individuals around the world, all with the unifying desire to turn what they do into something better, more positive and sustainable. We also work closely with executives and CEOs, as well as Human Resource and Sustainability Managers. If you want to make change, we are here to help. 

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